[gentoo-hardened] security updates

[Nagy Gabor Peter <linux42@freemail.hu>]

Hi list,

I have a question:

Since I am new to gentoo, I don't know how security updates work.

I know Debian. In Debian if I have stable installed on a production
server, I get regular security fixes, often backported from the current
bleeding edge version, where upstream has fixed the bug to the version
that Debian stable contains.

I have noticed that in gentoo there are many versions of a package that
are considered stable. Take glibc as an example, according to
http://packages.gentoo.org/search/?sstring=glibc, on x86 there are 8
versions available, all of them stable.

I have now two gentoo machines, one is going to be production, the
other is used to get me a little bit more familiar with the system.

On the playground machine I have 2006.1 installed, glibc 2.4-r3
On the production machine I have 2006.0, switched to hardened profile,
and then recompile, there I have glibc 2.3.6-r5

I see now that glibc 2.4-r3 should be upgraded to 2.4-r4 (by the way,
where can I check the differences (Changelog) between two gentoo
versions (like r3 and r4)?)

So my question: If someone finds a bug in glibc that gets corrected,
what does the gentoo maintainers do about it? Do they backport the fix
in all 8 versions? Or just in some of the versions and mark the not
fixed ones ~?

Is there some mailinglist (like debian-security-announce) where such
security fixes are announced?

What is the reason that the hardened profile selects the 2.3.6 version
instead of the 2.4? I mean not in glibc's case only, but generally.

Does libc 2.4 have troubles with ssp?

Cheers,
G
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