[Leaplist] Another Vixta ??

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Fri, 2008-02-22 at 20:44 -0700, Kevin Anderson wrote:
> Cent will be closer to the RHEL that you think of then Fedora,
> which is (by design) a leading edge testbed for what will eventually
> become RHEL.

While you can build Fedora so it's RHEL ABI compatible, it's much easier
(and has much longer security updates) to just use CentOS.

The only thing RHEL sometimes trails RHEL on is kernel and GLibC
security updates.  Fedora, like most distros, can just patch or ship a
newer version without regression worries (or at least can just "leave a
note" on what might break).  RHEL always maintains full ABI, so some
security updates have been "held up" before because they broke ABI, but
typically never more than 24 hours.

I recommend deploying both Fedora and CentOS to understand the symbios
between Fedora and RHEL.  Or if you're looking more towards Novell,
OpenSUSE and SLES.  BTW, both Novell and Red Hat offer their Enterprise
Linux versions for evaluation.  I don't know about Novell, but you can
request a box from Red Hat that will come with a 30-day Red Hat Network
entitlement.  I.e., you can get updates for 30 days from Red Hat once
installed.

Red Hat entitlements are not active until actually activated on a
system.

> In the debian world, RHEL is Stable, Fedora is Unstable (Sid).

This is grossly inaccurate and non-applicable.

Fedora has 3 tag model, just like Debian.  Fedora Development is like
Debian Sid in the engineering lifecycle.  Where Debian differs is that
building from Fedora Development may not result in a fully usable
distro, but then again, Debian Sid has had that happen too.  Debian also
has different constraints and release goals than Fedora -- from time to
focus.

Again, as I detailed in another post, Fedora will purposely ship newer
technologies.  They are _not_ "unstable," but they may very well be
"incompatible."  I.e., what ships with Fedora will work and will be well
package and integration tested, quite stable.  But you may run into
regressions or things that won't build.  That has always been what
people have bitched about with about every 2nd or 3rd Red Hat Linux and
Fedora release.

Any distro that adopts newer compilers, libraries, kernel threading,
kernel modules, etc... is going to have this issue, especially the more
intrusive they are.  Compliance, performance, security and
virtualization are just a couple of features that hit Red Hat Linux and
Fedora a good 1, 2 or even 3+ years before other distros.  But virtually
every distro eventually assimilates them.

Red Hat gets a lot of say in the community because it puts a lot of
developers on core components in many core projects, including being the
official maintainer on many of them.  Outside of Novell and Sun,
virtually all other contributors on the kernel are hardware-focused, and
not general capabilities.


-- 
Bryan J  Smith              Professional, Technical Annoyance
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org  http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith
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           Fission Power:  An Inconvenient Solution