On 2/3/21 1:44 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
RHL 7 was the first boxed pointless and the plan was to try and engage in doing just updates for 1,2,3 but that turned into too much sticking in the mud compared to other boxed sets which were pushing they were faster to market than Red Hat Linux. So 8 became its own thing and then 9, and there were howls of protest from various people who had built their deployments around X being a major and Y being smaller changes.. however the kernel and other software were now moving at a rate where 8 engineers could not keep up with all the packages needed at different levels.
It's hard to believe it was ever small enough that 8 engineers could keep up at all; we're long past the days when a whole release fit on a single 650MB CD. You guys did a great job in those early days!
...A fun fact about Pensacola is, if I remember correctly, that it carried the MAJOR version of 2.1 through seven update cycles; ...Yep.. the marketing reason was simple. The general IT manager rule for large deployments is NEVER deploy software which is 1.x or 2.0 . They will wait until 2.1 comes out. So like RHL 2.1, there was a RHEL-2.1 and yep.. people installed it a LOT more than RHEL-3 because it wasn't 3.1
Oh, that is rich! As I recall people were even happier when it hit x.2, the 'real stable' release. It threw everybody off-guard when RHL 7.3 released.... People are funny, no? Explains RHL 6.2E, too. I had often wondered why RHEL 2.1, now I know. Thanks for that!