[CentOS] two cents or not two cents

Thu Dec 16 23:19:21 UTC 2010
Keith Roberts <keith at karsites.net>

On Fri, 17 Dec 2010, Sean wrote:

> To: centos at centos.org
> From: Sean <soso at orcon.net.nz>
> Subject: [CentOS] two cents or not two cents
> 
> Hello Producers
>
> "Longevity of Support" is an attractive drawcard for CentOS if it means
> the exact opposite of Fedora's "short support cycle" that does not
> provide updating of infrastructural libraries for very long, libraries
> which newer versions of applications (like Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera
> etc) depend on and which wont install unless the libraries are also
> newer versions? But is that what it means -- ie that those
> infrastructural libraries (libpango, libcairo etc) are continuously
> updateable to fairly recent versions?
>
> If so, the problem is in reconciling that meaning with the reputation of
> CentOS to only support older versions of applications (eg Firefox-1.5,
> Thunderbird-1.0 etc). It does reconcile, of course, if  the implications
> are merely that the CentOS user must compile and install the later
> versions of such applications from source, rather than having the luxury
> of pre-packaged binaries. It doesn't reconcile if there is some other
> critical reason why newer such applications just wont install. But which?
>
> I ask here because the profusion of vague mission statements and
> 'target-enduser-profile' claims that litter the internet re '*nix
> distros' seldom actually address those real issues. And hopefully
> someone can enlighten. My complex production & developement desktop
> takes months to fully port to a new OS (or OS-version), so OS updates to
> get library updates (ala Fedora philosophy) becomes increasingly untenable.

You might be interested in giving my ALI scripts a whirl on 
a spare machine (even an old laptop)  to start with, so you 
get used to how they work.

I wrote these especially to deal with doing a fresh linux 
installation.

http://www.karsites.net/centos/anyuser/auto-linux-installer.php

I can set up the services I want running in under 10 
seconds. Beats sitting there doing it manually for 3 days!

The general idea is that you modify the installer scripts to 
work with a particular system - just do it one time. Then 
you can replay the scripts as often as you want, to 
re-install your system.

Please let the list know if they help with your 
installation/update woes.

BTW. Some applications such as Firefox need to be updated to 
their latest versions, otherwise websites will not work with 
an older version. I had these issues with running an 
old version of FF on Fedora 8. I went from F8 to F12 using 
my ALI scripts without any problems.

Kind Regards,

Keith Roberts

-- 
In theory, theory and practice are the same;
in practice they are not.

This email was sent from my laptop with Centos 5.5