[CentOS] CentOS-6 Status updates

Tue Jun 14 15:39:50 UTC 2011
Christopher Chan <christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk>

On Tuesday, June 14, 2011 11:23 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On 6/14/2011 10:06 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>> Benjamin Franz wrote:
>>> On 06/14/2011 06:19 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Timeliness, dunno. Ubuntu (or fedora) for production? NOT IF I HAVE ANY
>>>> CONTROL!!! Given how many developers write incredibly fragile code, that
>>>> is utterly dependent upon a very, very special environment, I guarantee
>>>> that the almost daily updates will break it, or the New Features! will
>>>> have changed interfaces....
>> <snip>
>>> And AppArmor has yet to 'knee-cap' me like SELinux has (repeatedly) by
>>> breaking previously stable systems. Where I routinely disable SELinux on
>>> CentOS, I have yet to have AppArmor interfere with normal ops - ever. It
>>> "just works".
>>
>> Ok... do you have in-house developed software? I've got one team that's
>> using ruby on rails, and the other admin has to compile it from source,
>> because they, I mean, just *have* to have the latest version, and another
>> team has a customized version of some software that is either licensed, or
>> open source, don't remember, that's all in java, and then there's the
>> parallel processing programs....
>>
>> But the first two, esp the first, are *incredibly* fragile, and I've seen
>> that in other places I've worked. Then there was the grief I had on a box
>> that's only used for offline backups on encrytped drives, and going from
>> 10? 11? to 13 was a nightmare, and X wouldn't work until I got rid of
>> gnome, and put KDE on....
>>
>> I want solid and stable.
>
> I don't get the comparisons. Do you have some specific bad experience
> with LTS to make this relevant?  If you are building stuff from source,
> the distribution packages are basically irrelevant - and in java the
> whole OS is mostly irrelevant.  Fedora releases are rather clearly
> alpha/beta versions intending to lead up to RHEL after a lot of
> bugfix/QA work to stabilize it.  But ubuntu isn't like that - they don't
> push stuff out just to get testing for some later money making release,

Okay, so you don't have to pay for LTS but unless I am mistaken, 
Canonical only offers paid support for LTS releases.


> it is the best they can do in the first place with an emphasis on ease
> of installation and use.  The LTS versions are even designed to do
> major-rev upgrades over the network - and it has worked on the machines
> where I've tried it.
>

Non-LTS are virtually the same as Fedora releases; experimental 
releases. Even some LTS releases get pushed out the door with major bugs 
in various packages. The only plus is that it is possible to do 
major-rev upgrades provided that you do not use third-party repos.

Every Ubuntu release has been fraught with the screams of victims who 
had their dist-upgrade blow up in their face whether LTS or non-LTS 
release. Okay, I personally have not had major problems, but it sure 
does not inspire confidence.