[Wiltshire] CentOS

[Lashley, Malcolm]

Nothing like a good distro war to liven up the ML ;-)

Just gonna pick up a couple of points inline:

-----Original Message-----
From: wiltshire-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk on behalf of Barrie Bremner
Sent: Mon 10/03/2008 16:10
To: wiltshire at mailman.lug.org.uk
Subject: Re: [Wiltshire] CentOS
 
I'm afraid Gentoo systems (particularly
for remote production machines) make me cringe. Binary packages++.

ML> Gentoo supports binary packages too (or I wouldn't be running it on my PS3 where 256mb of ram makes some compilations crawl.) If you fear breakage, you have the flexibility to quickpkg the existing installation of your apps before performing an upgrade - thus any possible rollback requirements are met quickly and painlessly. One of the other benefits is that it's dead easy to pull in cvs snapshots of gcc/binutils et. al. for new platforms, and build cross-development environments on a host machine (e.g. I do all my PS3 kernel compilations on a Gentoo x86_64 host) 

The benefit of systems like RHEL or CentOS (which is, as previously
mentioned, basically repackaged RHEL), or Debian stable is that you
have a long maintenance lifetime (7 years - see
http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/) and a stable set of
applications. If something needs fixing then fixes are backported, you
don't suddenly get dumped with a new and possibly incompatible version
of the affected programme. You don't get that sort of stability with
Gentoo or Fedora, but that's not the focus of those distros.

ML> Last I looked Gentoo *does* backport fixes as and when the need arises, but this is left up to the volunteers to make a time/effort/benefit decision. Hell the ancient mysql-3.23 is still in portage. gcc versions from 2.95 thru 4.2.x are there and can be installed simultaneously - with handy tools to simply switch between different compiler versions as needed, ditto php4/5 etc. etc. I only use RHEL/Centos when a vendor refuses to support anything else (that's finger-pointing at you IBM with your Cell-SDK, and even there, Gentoo has working e-builds to make it work on their distro.)

ML> That's my $0.02 chucked in the pot. Cheers, malc.