[CentOS] Thanks, good bye, and an observation from a newbie.

Mon Oct 17 02:57:14 UTC 2005
Tim Edwards <tim at registriesltd.com.au>

Dave Gutteridge wrote:
> 	Then I look on the web and discover PlayerC, which seems like it might
> carry both the features I want. I download it, but it doesn't work.
> 	I come to the list and ask why, and I'm advised that CentOS is an
> enterprise level distribution, and not meant for running cutting edge
> applications. So I'm confused. After all, PlayerC doesn't do anything
> that PlayerA and PlayerB don't already do on CentOS, it just happens to
> do them together. How, I wonder, am I doing anything "cutting edge", or
> that would threaten the stability of CentOS?

Centos/RHEL is released once every 18 months and is focused on having a 
(relatively) small set of well tested, stable packages that are mainly 
aimed at servers and basic desktop functions like web and email. Makes 
perfect sense that they don't have the latest and greatest mp3 player 
package.

> 	It took me a while to realize that I was thinking about the results -
> playing MP3s, for example. But when developers were speaking about
> "cutting edge", they were speaking about the fact that the makers of the
> player were using exotic techniques which were incompatible with CentOS.
> Those techniques are opaque to me, so the miscommunication continued.

There's probably no 'exotic techniques' going on, just that Centos is 
not trying to keep up with the latest release of every package out 
there, just stable releases of a number of important packages. Centos 
can play mp3's as well as Ubuntu can, but if you want lots more 
available packages that are newer then Ubuntu is probably the way to go.


-- 
Tim Edwards