On 6/18/2010 5:02 PM, Whit Blauvelt wrote:
>
>> Fun fact: Postfix-2.3.3 has been released in August 2006. Think about that.
>
> To be fair, RH/CentOS also ships with Sendmail-8.13.8, also from August 2006. What
> a golden month for mail daemons that was.
>
> The door's wide open for someone with the energy to put together a server
> distro based on CentOS but with modern versions of essential daemons. Yes,
> it wouldn't inherit certification from commercial software vendors who now
> spec RH/CentOS. But major daemons like Postfix and Sendmail are very well
> tested in tens of thousands of deployments in versions not over a year old
> (which are significantly superior to versions from 2006, no matter how much
> backporting of new features RH might have done meanwhile). They should be
> stock in any current distro.
>
> It used to be that RH's advantage was its daemons weren't as crufty as
> Debian stable. But now with Ubuntu's server version solid - not nearly as
> well supported by the user community as CentOS, but quite current in its
> major daemon versions - those who want there to be good, widely used distros
> in the RH mold five years out from now would do well to push ahead of RH in
> the server space. Some sort of a CentOS+, unbound from RH's laggard ways,
> but conservative in its stability, could find itself quite welcome in the
> world.
>
> Is anyone working on this? (No, not Fedora. That's not a server OS.)
I agree with the sentiment of wanting something with a well-tested
kernel and base lib set and fairly current apps, but you do know that
RHEL6 beta is out now don't you? It has been a while but you wouldn't
have wanted anything based on the intermediate Fedora versions. So it's
probably not the time to start thinking about building something else.
And the LTS versions of Ubuntu would probably be the place to jump if
you are looking for current alternatives.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com