5 years of support..!!??

[gene heskett]

On Friday, March 02, 2012 06:44:55 AM Bill Vance did opine:

> On Thu, Mar 01, 2012 at 11:27:36PM +0000, Mark Greenwood wrote:
> >Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2012 23:27:36 +0000
> >From: Mark Greenwood <fatgerman at gmail.com>
> >Subject: Re: 5 years of support..!!??
> >
> >On 1 Mar 2012, at 23:13, Jonathan Riddell wrote:
> >> On 1 March 2012 22:52, Mark Greenwood <fatgerman at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> I subscribe to several RSS feeds and one of them just sent me the
> >>> following:
> >>> 
> >>> "The Kubuntu Community is pleased to announce plans for
> >>> the 12.04 LTS release of Kubuntu. As approved by the
> >>> Ubuntu Technical Board on January 9th, 12.04 will be a
> >>> 5-year long-term support cycle for Kubuntu"
> >>> 
> >>> So, 12.04 will be supported for 5 years. This is good
> >>> news, really good news.
> 
> So what does this mean for 10.04 LTS?  Just how many long
> term projects can be supported before quality drops even
> further into the cesspits?
> 
> Bill

I think that is an excellent question.  I have a situation using 10.04 LTS 
in my shop in that I cannot ssh into my cnc controller from my laptop, both 
running 10.04 without opening a huge security hole into my own local 
network when I power up the router/ap out in that outbuilding, and its 
entirely related to the version of wpa_supplicant that 10.04 LTS has 
'frozen into' 10.04, its incapable to doing anything more secure than WEP.  
The rest of the world has had WPA2/AES etc abilities for nearly 2 years 
now, but we can't get it on 10.04 LTS?

IMO that doesn't seem to fit the scenario I have in mind for open source.  
So I am disappointed, and cannot wait for LinuxCNC to migrate their RTAI 
kernel to 12.04.  Since that freezes the kernel, its doubtful that will 
take place until 12.04 has had time for its kernel to mature, probably 2-3 
months after the official release.

One would think that fixing a security hole that big would make it 
worthwhile to update wpa_supplicant and the crypto libs it needs would be 
of sufficiently high priority to force the update, but its never happened.

Cheers, Gene
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