Libranet fonts ?

[Michael Hipp]

Leon Goldstein wrote:
> The Debian security updates are reportedly kept current, but since I 
> don't run a server this is of little interest to me.

Do they actually keep them current, or just backport patches to the old 
versions? I don't know, but everyone else seems to do the backporting 
thing 95% of the time.

> What particular apps do you need to be cutting edge?

Well, all of them! ;-)

Not really, of course. The thing is ... Linux apps, unlike Windows,
actually deliver increased value or actual bug fixes with each new
release (the whole stable/unstable thing could almost be said to be 
reversed). So why not have the latest and greatest. I certainly don't do
this with everything or even most things, but don't want to be limited
to things that are months old. So the predictable answer is to compile 
from source, but spending hours futzing around with config options is a 
painful endeavor.

Just a few examples of things that I looked at:
- KDE is at 3.1.5
- k3b is at 10.3 (4/2003)
- Firebird is at 0.7
- Thunderbird is at 0.4
- Xfce appears to be at 4.0.0_cvs (and won't run)

To be fair, I found several that were at current version. Several that 
were at the official stable version but where most everyone has been 
running some beta release for a very long time. And several that were 
not available at all (one of which seems like an egregious omission: 
wxWindows).

I have several projects coming up that may involve varying things 
(databases, web authoring, old DOS apps, wxWindows custom apps, embedded 
systems, etc.) and can't be sure what tools I'll need. But I'd like to 
be able to get them and keep them current with a minimum of fuss.

Apologies for whining ... I like Libranet 2.8.1 so far. But even tho my 
beloved Red Hat no longer wants my business, giving it up is not 
something done easily :-)

Michael