On Wed, 2010-03-03 at 01:34 +0100, Björn Persson wrote:
Adam Williamson wrote:
> you can try and cherry-pick security updates, but then you get the
> problem where initial release has Foobar 1.0, then Foobar 3.5 gets
> shipped in updates, then a security problem emerges and Foobar 3.5-2
> with the security fix gets shipped in updates. You now have a choice of
> unsecure Foobar 1.0, or completely new version Foobar 3.6.
There's also the other variant where a security problem is found in Foobar 1.0
but the problem isn't present in Foobar 3.0 and later. Upstream still supports
the 1.0 branch and releases Foobar 1.0.4 to fix the problem, but no security
update is released for Fedora since there is no problem in the latest Fedora
package. The Fedora user who chose not to upgrade Foobar won't even know that
there is a security problem.
This isn't a hard problem, 3.0 should then be marked as a security
update. Sure it sucks that you have to go from 1.0.4 to 3.0, and
presumably a lot will change, but that's Fedora.
On the other hand if "yum --security update" does not fix the known
security problems on your system, that's a huge exploit waiting to
happen ... and one I doubt any users know about.
I've sent a query to security@ to clarify.
--
James Antill - james(a)fedoraproject.org
http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/releases
http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/whatsnew/3.2.27
http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/YumMultipleMachineCaching