[Gllug] CentOS and RHES

[Karanbir Singh]

Martin A. Brooks wrote:
> Simon Morris wrote:
>> In your opinion why is this? Simply the lack of people making packages
>> or do Red Hat restrict the amount of software they are happy to provide
>> through official channels?

there is the issue of support as well - Redhat put out CyrusIMAPD and 
Dovecot into the EL4 distro, so thats what they will maintain and have 
trained staff at the other end of a phone call to talk to you about 
them. It would be kinda manic to also need to support ( against a SLA ) 
about 50 other pop3/imapd servers ( feel free to correct me if debian 
has more than  50 :) )

> I imagine Redhat would love to have the same sort of QA and, as far as 
> they go, I think their QA is one of the best out there but they lack the 
> concept of developmental stages that enables debian's packages to prove 
> themselves in the wild.  By the time you install a package you can be 
> sure that hundreds if not thousands of other people have done so without 
> problems.  Not just the same source, _the very same binary_. Also where 
> this binary interacts with other parts of the system, it will also be 
> _the very same binaries_; this is critical to ensuring the quality of a 
> package.

I guess this sort of development - testing - stable, is done to a 
certain extent with Rawhide and Fedora Core ( both of which actually 
carry a lot more pkgs than will ever make it into RHEL, and therefore 
CentOS ). A good example would be the OpenIPMI pkgs just made available 
on EL4.

Your point about the _same_ binaries is valid, only about 72% of EL4 saw 
action elsewhere in Rawhide or FC pkgs, the other 28% is patched for EL 
/ tested for EL internally at redhat and then via a Beta release. 
However, the flip side being that extensive testing for months and years 
before something becomes stable is that most new h/w is not well supported.

eg. the other day I was talking to someone on irc getting a new 3ware 
9550sx card working on Debian stable - he was not having much fun, while 
it just worked out of the box on CentOS4. And his backend supplier ( 
some custom app fronted on Oracle ) would only support Deb Stable or 
RHEL/CentOS. Anyway, since his comfort zone is Debian, thats where he 
wanted to get it working and he did... a few hours down the road.

- K
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