[CentOS] Spacewalk or Puppet?

nate centos at linuxpowered.net
Thu Nov 5 15:35:13 UTC 2009


Les Mikesell wrote:

> already know how to use them.  Imagine if every free OS distribution had
> included a broken copy of bash and perl and maybe even C and internally
> modified
> their code so things still mostly worked.

Were you around back in the late 90s when redhat shipped a broken
gcc? :) Even today redhat seems to have the biggest mind share and perhaps
even market share, so even if nobody else shipped the broken stuff that
left a very large chunk of users impacted by it, and vendors as well
since they built stuff to run on redhat.

As for java I suppose having a working java binary in the base install
certainly would help a bit, but for me the bulk of my work with java
has been with Tomcat and BEA Weblogic. I'm not even sure today if tomcat
is available in the base distros, and certainly Weblogic is not since
it's a big fat expensive piece of shit, I mean piece of software.

And even if tomcat was included it's not exactly the easiest thing to
use out of the box, even after almost 7 years of using tomcat I still
find regular old apache 10x easier to manage, so I lean towards more
basic solutions when they present themselves.

Java for other uses I believe has been hindered primarily due to
performance reasons rather than lack of good binaries being included
in the default distributions. It has a big stigma around it for good
reason, JVM startup time isn't exactly fast, it tends to have a large
memory footprint, and I think it wasn't until Java 1.5 that you
had the ability to share a heap between multiple apps(not sure what
the right terminology is), but being able to attach an app to an
already running "common" VM. Maybe not but I think I read something
about that a few years ago.

Even though I do have the knowledge to be able to install the  "right"
JVM I tend to avoid java on my own systems wherever possible. It
certainly has it's use cases, but I don't see it as something that
should(or could) replace something like C or perl etc on a broad
scale(at least not yet).

The thing I dislike most about Java though isn't java itself, it's
JMX. But that's another topic..

But I do agree that getting java in with a better license at a much
earlier time would of helped, I'm just not sure how much.

nate





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