[CentOS] Spacewalk or Puppet?

Thu Nov 5 14:09:32 UTC 2009
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

nate wrote:
> Christoph Maser wrote:
> 
>> I work in a java shop and I really thik you both are wrong. We do some
>> pretty amazing things with it and openjdk in centos (wich I think you
>> were relating to) is working quite well for us.
> 
> For me it's never been an issue, I've been in java shops since
> pre RHEL, and we've always installed 3rd party jdks, it's not
> that hard they come in RPM format, at least Sun JDK and BEA
> Jrockit. It's by no means the only 3rd party RPM that we use.
> 
> Short of those dropping off the face of the planet myself I have
> no reason to try anything else.

Sure, if you are 'in a java shop' you'll have someone around that knows how (and 
more importantly why) to find a real version and nuke the broken one supplied in 
your PATH. But languages don't get popular by only being used in places that 
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.  What kind of effect would that have 
had on new people learning to program?  That's the kind of damage that's been 
done to java - which is ironic because it was designed to be perfectly portable.

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com