[Cialug] CentOS

[Matthew Nuzum]

David Champion wrote:
> How would you compare running RH vs Fedora vs CentOS?

> Anyone following the universal package management front? i.e.
> http://autopackage.org/

I've used the autopackage stuff... it seems to work very well.

Regarding RH vs Fedora vs CentOS:
Fedora changes quickly. For example, if you deploy an application and
assume a certain set of libraries, you can spend a lot of time, effort
and maybe money ensuring that your software works as expected. Little
changes can have a huge impact. When you buy RHEL, you're saying, I'm
buying this system, with this set of libraries, and they're not going to
change for X years - security updates will be back ported to the
versions I've standardized on. This is a big deal.

CentOS (and Oracle Linux) say, well, we *should* be binary compatible
with RHEL and for as long as RHEL releases updates for a product, we'll
port those to CentOS to give users a theoretically similar level of
compatiblity.

Fedora says, "Screw the old versions, let's get the newest stuff as
quick as we can!"

Just a note: Ubuntu is based on Debian, but even though in some cases we
simply rebuild packages from Debian, we can't guarantee binary
compatibility. Should it work? Yes. Will it work? Probably. Can we
guarantee it will work? No way.

This is the same situation with Oracle Linux and CentOS. When you
certify software/hardware with a distro, you're not certifying with the
source, you're certifying with the binaries. Rebuilding packages means
different binaries. This is why MySQL requires you to use their binaries
to get commercial support.

I invested a lot of time, money and mental energy into certifying a
large software package on RedHat only to have them pull the rug out from
under me by switching to the Fedora/RHEL model.

/me steps off soap box
http://www.bearfruit.org/blog/2004/08/22/fedora-project-sponsored-by-red-hat/
(note the date on that post)
-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode