Posted by J.O. Aho on 03/10/07 20:20

JM wrote:
> I installed a webserver based on scientific linux 4.4 yesterday (not my
> idea, but my bosses) and after doing all updates (apt-get and yum) the
> version of PHP was 4.3.9. Current version (at least for PHP4) is 4.4.6.
> 4.3.9 is 2.5 years old.
> Scientific linux is based Red Hat Enterprise Linux so I took a look
> there: same thing, but it mentioned that bugfixes were backported.
> What exactly does this mean ? Does it mean that all/some of the changes
> (bugfixes, ...) since the appearance of version 4.3.9 are applied to
> your installation but that the version number of your server doesn't
> change. Is there any means to know how up to date you version of php is
> ? Does my 'backported' 4.3.9 equals version 4.4.6 of 4.4.4 or ...


There happens there is a bug that has been in for a long time, moved
with each update before been found in the recent version, as the around
code changes, it's not sure the patch that you apply to 4.4.5 to fix the
bug will work on 4.3.9, so you have to fix the patch so it applies to
4.3.9, this is the backport. With a backport you only affect the bug
itself, you don't patch it up to 4.4.6, so your PHP is still 4.3.9, but
isn't affected by the bugs that the backported patch fixed.

It's possible to backport features too, that happens more often in the
kernel, specially features from the 2.6 kernels to the 2.4 kernels.

--

//Aho

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