[CentOS] Fedora bugs and EOL [was Re: CentOS users: please try and provide feedback on Fedora] Boltron

Wed Aug 2 11:31:40 UTC 2017
hw <hw at gc-24.de>

Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 28, 2017 at 10:11:53PM +0100, Phil Perry wrote:
>> The issue I have here is even if I did file a bug, and the issue
>> were fixed, no sooner than it's fixed fedora updates to the next
>> version and introduces a whole bunch of new bugs, and so the cycle
>> continues. I played that game for a while with fedora core when Red
>> Hat Linux died before settling on Enterprise Linux and have never
>> looked back.
>
> Sure; that's the tradeoff of getting new stuff.
>
> But, I'm not asking anyone here to switch to Fedora. I'm asking
> (especially those of you who are professional sysadmins) to please look
> at the Modularity prototype.

Well, it might have some merits if it does work and makes its way into
Centos because with Centos, I´m finding myself unusually often needing a
more recent version of a package --- or something that isn´t packaged at
all --- than is installed by default.

That leaves to ask whether making it easier to require users to have a mess
of different versions of packages installed all at the same time or providing
more recent packages by default is the better solution.  Considering that
not providing sufficiently recent packages apparently comes from a fear of
breaking things, you need to explain how it is better to provide a mess of
different versions of packages by default because doing that appears to make
it easier to have things broken (by default), while making it much more
difficult for everyone to maintain the distribution and their machines.

So in the end, how does it NOT make things worse?  And that doesn´t even
mention the necessity to fix bugs found in outdated versions of software.
People might use them because they suddenly have become easy to install.

It COULD make things better when more recent packages could be installed
AND made the default, already because it is unwieldy having to take care of
using the right version of gcc and other things to compile software that isn´t
packaged, which is unwieldy to begin with because you also need to keep it up
to date.  So instead of providing more different versions of the same packages,
it might be better to package more different software.

Guess what, even nasm in Centos is outdated, and you have to enable yet another
repo to get the current version, or install it yourself.  That doesn´t go along
well with the overrated fear of breaking things, not one way, nor the other.

You could even say this multiversion thing is about providing a way of breaking
things, much like brokenarch was with Debian.