officially supported packages

[Michael R. Head]

On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 12:41 -0700, Hans Omli wrote:
> Also based on my past with RHEL and RHEL-based distros... There are a
> small number of packages I was surprised to find don't have official
> support (aren't in main repository) on the Ubuntu server distro.

> I'm happy to apt-get install both packages, but a bit queezy about
> enabling universe on my servers for what seem like pretty basic
> packages (to someone coming from RHEL). 

I wouldn't worry too much, but of course it depends on your application
and environment. 

> Are these designated universe based on Debian roots?

Most packages in the universe are pulled from some snapshot of
debian/testing. You can determine if this is so by looking at the
package version number. If it's something like 1.2-X or 1.2-Xubuntu3 for
X > 0, then it's either a copy of debian's 1.2-X package (in the 1.2-X
case), or based on the debian package (in the 1.2-Xubunt3 case). You can
find the changelog in /usr/share/doc/[packagename]/changelog.Debian.gz
to see what was modified for the ubuntu package.

If on the other hand the version X = 1, then it's a MOTU package.

Keep in mind, there is a process for handling security fixes for the
universe, but I think someone does have to create the security patch for
that process to start.

-- 
Michael R. Head <burner at suppressingfire.org>
http://www.suppressingfire.org/~burner/
http://suppressingfire.livejournal.com
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