[CentOS] General question on QA from a Fedora Core fan

Thu Apr 28 20:42:13 UTC 2005
Steve Bergman <steve at rueb.com>

Apologies if this ends up a dup, but there seems to have been a problem 
with my original subscription.

------------------------------

Hello,

I am currently using Fedora on most of my servers.  It does pretty
well.  I do have occasional problems which seem to me to stem from poor QA.

For example, /usr/bin/enable <queue> coming back with "Enable:  I don't
know what to do!" after a cups errata upgrade when I would try to
re-enable a printer.  The "-c#" (multiple copies) option to lpr not
working for serial printers due to a bug in the "serial" backend. (But
to which a patch is applied to fix the same problem in the parallel
backend).  Finding my first flaw in the OS when I try to check the CD
media during the install.  The media check always fails.  (Yes, there
are going to be bugs, but finding the first one before you even get the
installation media checked looks really bad.  And, yes, the ide=nodma
workaround fixes it.)

I was very hopeful about CentOS shielding me and my clients from silly
stuff like this.  However, looking at the RHEL source for the serial
backend to cups, it looks as though the patch to make "-c#" work on it
has not been applied to serial.c.  And the media check still fails with
CentOS unless I use "ide=nodma", just like with Fedora.

This is disappointing.

Now, I wish to make it perfectly clear that I *DO NOT* consider this to
be the fault of CentOS, as I understand that the policy is to remain
faithfully compatible to RHEL.

But if I ask RH about this, I know that I will get an "oh so politically
correct" answer.

On the positive side, looking at the errata, it looks as though CentOS
has drastically fewer notices than Fedora, and I assume that is because
there really are more problems (security of otherwise) shaken out during
testing.

Obviously, not being forced to upgrade due to withdrawal of support with
regards to security patches every 1.5 years is a plus.

So I welcome comments.  If I switch my clients from Fedora to CentOS,
they don't have the latest and greatest  (and, for example,  I need
OpenOffice 2.0 ASAP for one of my clients due to it's Access-like
interface to PostgreSQL), but how much advantage am I really looking at
with regards to stability?

i.e. I know all the reasons that CentOS *should* be more rock solid 
stable.  But is there a noticeable difference in reality?

Thanks For Any Input.

Sincerely,
Steve Bergman








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