On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 07:57, Chris Dagdigian wrote: > Another item that has been on my mind recently... > > What are people doing about RedHat deciding to kill off their consumer > product line? Are people going to pay the freight for Redhat Enterprise > Linux or are people just going to use Suse/Debian/Gentoo etc. I'm going to push for fedora. Obviously, people running large clusters that have to cater to more than one set of users have to be a little more careful in the change-management department, and for those people the pain of re-certifying everyone's apps is going to be a concern. However, I expect that moving between fedora releases won't be terribly painful (per fedora objective #7 [1]), and if that's still too much change there's the fedora legacy project [2]. In his email Chris said fedora expected 2-3 "major" releases per year, but I don't see the "major" in any of the actual fedora pages. If pain caused by change is the problem, then I understand people who want less change, but there's a lot of room for improvement in making change less painful, and I would rather expend effort there than in back-porting errata fixes to old versions of software. For us, we have a relatively small cluster used by a relatively small number of people in one main field. We have source for most of our apps, and the expertise to fix, recompile, and (to some extent) port them, so I'm not too concerned about binary compatibility. Also, there are places where having more recent software would be nice-- lm_sensors, SATA, ACPI, IPMI, there must be others on the hardware side. On the software side, is it just me or is the pace of change in clustering-related software picking up? It might be worthwhile to live nearer to the edge of some of those projects. IMHO, something like ROCKS would work better as a set of packages in fedora-extras. There are getting to be more and more third-party packagers for Red Hat, and you just know that if they all stay separate then you're going to want packages from more than one, and they're going to conflict with one another somehow. Fedora-extras isn't going to enforce a no-conflict policy, but I would expect better feedback and communication about conflicts in the fedora-extras case than in the "we're all going to do our own thing" case. Mitch [1] http://fedora.redhat.com/about/objectives.html [2] https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/fedora-legacy-list/