[Gllug] Free Vs enterprise OSS releases

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 12:24:07AM +0100, Chris Jones wrote:
> RHEL packages and Fedora packages are not necessarily compatible at all.
> They will probably mostly work, but you may get bitten and afaik there
> is no guarantee that Fedora packages will even install on RHEL, let
> alone work properly.

That's as result of the different updates models used in RHEL vs Fedora.
Each Fedora has a 12-18 month lifetime and for bug fixes / security errata
we typically push out the latest upstream package in preference to patching.
RHEL meanwhile has a 7 year lifetime & is much more focused around stability,
so bugs / errata are always done with patches / backports to maintain the
stability. So while the original Fedora Core 6 GA packages were more or less
compatible with RHEL-5 GA packages, in the months since FC6 was released a
large number of updates have been made available, so the latest FC6 packages
are based much newer upstream versions in many cases. This version mismatch
will increasingly limit how easily you can install Fedora packages on RHEL
overtime. So, yes its best to use packages built explicitly for RHEL - even
if that's merely a case of re-building a source RPM in a RHEL build chroot
build environment.

> If you want to do this kind of thing I would always recommend using
> source packages and rebuilding them on a machine with the same version
> of RHEL/SLES. Even that guarantees you nothing and you should thoroughly
> test your builds (which is exactly what Red Hat and Novell will be doing
> with their own apache2.2 builds I imagine).

Rebuilding on a machine with same version of RHEL is completely unneccessary.
For Fedora / RHEL the build system is based on YUM + Mock, which is doing
builds in a chroot populated with the packages belonging to the distro being
built for. I'd recommend using mock because it ensures that the build env
is  populated with the precise minimal set of packages for build dependancies,
and guarentees that their installs are pristine - ie no delibrate/accidental
changes to files by the admin of the machine.

Regards,
Dan.
-- 
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