Agree with everything you're saying about bleeding edge distros.
Having written quite a bit of PHP, however, I think its fair to say that most developers are fully aware that software is always evolving and probably believe that you may as well write for the latest version because before long it'll be mainstream anyway.
Occasionally there are real generational differences between versions.
I find the constant upgrade treadmill with things like CMSs (Drupal etc) a real pain as well.
Donald Buchan wrote:
I changed to linux a couple of years ago for a bunch of reasons. WGA was one of them.
Being noob at the time -- still think I am today -- I had someone do it for me.
They were going to put CentOS 4.4 in, but at the last minute, they put in Fedora 5. Apparently, the -devel fork. What a disaster.
I was glad when my laptop got CentOS 4.4. It was stable. It worked. Things didn't break. No dependency hell. Shortly after, Fedora was nuked and both desktop and laptop were on 4.4. Today both machines have gone through the upgrade cycles are at 4.7, quite happily.
My "new" desktop (the old one is now the home router, DVD burder, Azureus download box, and has my 80gig mass storage drive; it has 5.2 as of this morning.
What do I think of non-EL distros?
I'm glad I'm not having to curse for weeks every six months when I have to upgrade, that's what I think of them.
And I'm a desktop user. No servers per se.
Now I have to see if the new printer I got at Christmas will work without major surgery, like it needed for the 4.6 desktop. :) (I figure HP gave the summer student who knows linux a pet project to make the open source driver, and (s)he probably was using the latest drivers and libraries while downing Jolt Cola. :) )
On Tue, 2008-06-24 at 10:40 -0700, John R Pierce wrote:
Tony Mountifield wrote:
I always get frustrated with apps requiring the latest and greatest versions of PHP, etc., before they are made available for the major distributions.
Is it that the very newest feature is really indispensable and the app can't possibly make do without it, or just because the developer has the bleeding-edge version on his own box and doesn't make the effort to test his app with more mainstream versions?
totally. its the new/shiny syndrome. more than once, I've found 1-2 simple 1-line fixes enabled a newer version of a given PHP app to run on an older version of PHP.
sadly, much of the OSS community seem to think that stable enterprise distributions like RHEL and SuSE are evil incarnate, second only to Microsoft (which they inevitably spell with a $).
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos