These long term support distros are toxic to everyone except proprietary softwar...

Nux · on March 8, 2015

You are surely joking and you're not good at it.

feld · on March 8, 2015

Do you trust package maintainers at Redhat/Debian/etc to properly backport security fixes to ancient branches? They don't exactly have a clean track record.

Look at the terribly old / EOL software in RHEL4 that is on "extended support" until 2017:

  Java 1.4
  SVN 1.1
  Apache 2.0
  Stunnel 4.0.5
  Python 2.3
  Glibc 2.3.4
  Firefox 1.0

edit: I stumbled upon some ELSA advisories a few weeks ago where additional security updates needed to be released for Apache because the CVE for which they intended to backport a fix was not adequately patched.

That is terrifying. There's a reason why upstream doesn't release fixes for those old releases.