[Gllug] Cost of RedHat vs Ubuntu desktop support

[Hari Sekhon]

- Tethys wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 2:01 PM, Joel Bernstein<joel at fysh.org> wrote:
> <snip>
> so RH and Novell seem
> to be giving their customers what they want by backporting. It's hard
> to argue with that as a business strategy
Interestingly, most of the job specs I've seen on the market request 
Rhel... so if you're a career IT professional...

Speaking of developers wanting packages that are not supported by 
Redhat, I have personal experience of this and it's a pain.

If developers want to use an underdog language for web development and 
use a library that was released 2 months ago on a stable server, how can 
you expect it to be packaged for you?

Some of the libraries like matplotlib were supplied, but they needed a 
feature from the very latest version, so again same problem.

Having the very latest and greatest is diametrically opposed to 
stability because there has not been enough time passed to assess it's 
long term stability. I have servers on Redhat, Centos, Debian and Ubuntu 
so I am in a fair position to talk here: Ubuntu server is more 
comparable to Debian testing, I am looking at one Debian testing server 
(well a Debian stable with testing and apt pinning) and an Ubuntu 
"server" edition right now, and they require very similar levels of 
patching due to package changes, which is to say, a _lot_ more than 
Redhat/CentOS requires.

Lack of or outdated packages is one of the main arguments that are made 
against Debian, but Debian is at the same time considered to be one of 
the most stable server distributions out there. It seems Debian folks 
can't disagree with backports as implied otherwise Debian backports 
wouldn't exist...

-h

-- 
Hari Sekhon
http://www.linkedin.com/in/harisekhon

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