[CentOS] is CentOS stable enough ?
Warren Young
warren at etr-usa.com
Mon Jun 11 23:48:34 UTC 2007
arnuld wrote:
>
> Fedora is the one of the most buggy *NIX distro i have ever seen.
I doubt that Fedora is any more "buggy" than any other Linux distro,
since they all share so much code. That makes me wonder what your real
complaint is. Some guesses:
1. You just don't like the Red Hat way of system administration. (yum,
chkconfig, etc.) In that case, you won't like CentOS.
2. Your "bugs" are due to how often things on Fedora change, breaking
other things. In that case, you'll probably love CentOS.
Each major release of CentOS lives for many years, overlapped with the
previous release. So right now, with CentOS 5.0 just out, we're halfway
through CentOS 4.x's lifetime. Each point release of CentOS 4.x only
gathers patches to packages that shipped with CentOS 4.0. No new
packages will make it into 4.x, and patches to existing versions are
always preferred to wholly new versions. The only reason there are even
formal releases is so people can deploy new machines without having to
download everything that's changed since 4.0. When you have a system
that's happily running CentOS 4.x, it's likely to keep running happily
forever as long as you stay within the 4.x line.
The only time you have a problem will be when 4.9 is eventually
released, which will be about the same time as CentOS 6.0. At that
point, the Upstream Vendor will stop providing patches to 4.x, so you
have to decide whether to stick with 4.9, move to 5.x, or move to 6.0.
If it needs to keep running as-is, with minimal meddling, stick with 4.9
and manage any needed patches yourself. If you need some new technology
but can't afford much risk, go with 5.x. And if you're prepared to
completely rebuild the system if necessary in order to have maximum
upside, go with 6.0. When risk can be high, it is very satisfying to
have a set of choices like this.
More information about the CentOS
mailing list