[luau] fedora q's

[Warren Togami]

On Mon, 2003-09-22 at 14:35, Charles Lockhart wrote:
> I've been trying to understand fedora, but am still confused about a few 
> things.
> 
> The Fedora Project generates package management (install, update) tools, 
> such as apt and yum?

apt and yum are generic tools which can download, install and update
packages from an arbitrary source.  fedora.us was one of many sources of
3rd party packages for Red Hat Linux.  freshrpms.net is another.

> You need to keep your system "pure", ie only use/install RH and Fedora 
> packages?

That is not a 100% requirement, but Fedora could not guarantee
compatibility with packages from other sources.  Chances are however
that maybe 95% of packages from elsewhere work fine though.

The sign that says "we cannot guarantee compatibility" was more of a
warning than a rule for users who want simplicity by avoiding breakage.

> 
> In response to a problem I was having with version issues between RH 7.3 
> and RH 9 ( that RH 9 has some functionality "dumbed down" to remove 
> liability for distributing software that uses things like mpeg, etc ), 
> Warren mentioned that the full user versions could be downloaded and 
> installed using fedora and a 3rd party server.  What 3rd party servers 
> are availble?

These are easily found with Google.  Please do not ask me to point the
way.

> 
> Is fedora a viable candidate for maintaining a systems security patches? 
>   For example, the recent openssh vulnerability, and subsequent security 
> updates, is this something that fedora is designed to handle?

Yes, the old Fedora at fedora.us currently has all RH updates as well as
updates for its own packages whenever they are released.  The fedora.us
project will continue operating for several more months while the new
fedora.redhat.com project is forming.

Warren Togami
warren at togami.com