[Gllug] CentOS and RHES

[Jason Clifford]

On Fri, 21 Oct 2005, Alain Williams wrote:

> Cantos take the RH source RPMs and recompile them. The only changes that they
> make are to remove some RH trade/copyrighted stuff like logos.
> 
> IE there is no real difference.

There is a difference but it's not in the software but rather in the lack 
of proper infrastructure to support the distro.

A client of mine discovered this the hard way a few days ago when the 4.2 
release came out. Against my advise he had set up a cron job to 
automatically run "yum update" every morning and it tried to upgrade from 
4.1 to 4.2.

While the upgrade did work it changed things and seemed to break 
something. The problem arose when trying to verify that the update had run 
properly as yum was unable to run after about 8.30am as the CentOS folks 
had issued the update without bothering to get all the mirrors sync'd.

Consequently many CentOS users found that yum didn't work or that the 
update failed or otherwise things went wrong and yum doesn't give decent 
error messages.

This wasn't a problem with the distro but rather a reflection of the fact 
that CentOS doesn't have competent release management and the team don't 
understand online distribution issues.

For me this meant half a morning wasted investigating the cause of the 
problem and getting my customers site back online (a change to the mysql 
server meant that the customer's custom config wouldn't start).

The response from the CentOS folks on their irc channel to the yum problem 
was "wait a day or two for the mirrors to catch up". That's not acceptable 
in an enterprise distro.

Jason
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