[Gllug] Free Vs enterprise OSS releases

[Chris Jones]

Hi

Yashpal Nagar wrote:
> e.g apache 2.2.4 rpms are available from Opensuse but not yet available
> from Novell for their enterprise class of OS.

because 2.2.4 was only released a couple of months ago and so hasn't
proved itself stable enough to make it into "enterprise" versions of
distributions.

> What i want to know here is, as a practice should one go ahead and
> install (on top of RHEL/SUSE) such updates/packages from Fedora or

No.

> Opensuse, whenever they become available? if yes what could happen to
> the server when you apply service packs which lately become available

It could break.

> with no trouble? if no - then what are the reasons?

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.

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).

Depending on what you are looking for from the new version and what
version you are running now, it may well be easier to backport patches
from the newer version to the one you are running already (e.g. if you
are running 2.2.3 and want the security fixes, but you are paying your
enterprise distro people to do that for you, so I assume you want new
features)

I am biased in this matter, but my suggestion would be to use
distributions which don't distinguish between first class and second
class users :)

Cheers,
-- 
Chris Jones
  cmsj at tenshu.net
   www.tenshu.net
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