[CentOS] Is it okay?

Fri Jan 21 16:01:01 UTC 2011
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On 1/21/2011 8:55 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>  fedora "become"
> crazy, Mike? The beginning of '06, when I went to SuSE, I already knew
> that it was bleeding edge, and that wasn't just my opinion, but the
> opinion of a number of folks I know, whose technical expertise I respect,
> including some guy who's initials are ESR (his politica are another
> matter, but that's OT).

Bleeding edge or not wasn't quite the point - the problem was that there 
was never an attempt to converge the changes to stability, just a 
sequence of wildly different changes in every release.  In the history 
leading up to that, the pre-RHEL versions of RH would have an X.0 
release that everyone know would be buggy, and subsequent X.1, X.2 
versions that were increasingly stable.  And you could sort of relate 
the X.2 versions to Microsoft releasing 'service pack 2' for a product 
in that you really didn't want to use anything before that for anything 
but testing.  The first few RHEL releases sort of looked like the same 
pattern where there would be 2 fedora versions replacing the X.0, X.1 
RH's with the 3rd in the set being RHEL, but it didn't stay that way 
very long and quickly got to the point where is wasn't worth even 
testing on fedora because things would just be completely different in 
the next release and there was no effort to maintain hardware 
compatibility or user data across the upgrades - or sometimes even for 
minor updates.  I had a fairly mainstream IBM box refuse to boot an 
update kernel mid-fedora 5 or so.

And before someone else points it out, I know RH8 and RH9 didn't use the 
.0 minor number (perhaps to avoid the buggy connotation) but they were 
really more fedora-like and broke more things than users had come to 
expect in the the RH tradition.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com