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At some point hitherto, Paul Iadonisi hath spake thusly:
> >  Compare Derek's complaints to what I 
> > would consider "standard sysadmin practices" as espoused by Evi 
> > Nemeth, et al, in the UNIX/Linux System Administrator's Handbook 
> > series.  RH violates these basic practices with their configurations 
> > many times.
> 
>   *sigh*  I see the horse *is* still twitching.  At first glance, and
> knowing Red Hat's distribution quite well, I'd have to disagree. 
> However, I will now go read Derek's supposedly entertaining bug reports
> for a more accurate understanding of what you are saying.

Well, I wish you wouldn't.  Ben is right in that some of those bug
reports are less than complementary.  On a few occasions, I've allowed
frustration to get the better of me, and said some things I'd probably
prefer I didn't...  Paul L. is right though, I've been submitting bug
reports for every distribution (barring .0 releases, which I wouldn't
run on anything critical) since RH 5.1, and there have been some
pretty amazing cases...  Some of the better ones I've submitted were
under a variety of different e-mail addresses, which I'm not going to
bother to list.  I've also added extensive comments to bug reports
submitted by other people, which also wouldn't show up in Paul's
query.

I do agree with Paul that Red Hat does need better QA.  My personal
favorite bug was where Red Hat broke /bin/sort by adding i18n support
to it.  GNU textutils comes with a test suite, which RH's engineers
quite obviously never ran...  The best part is it took them over 6
months to release a fix...

But they have had a number of other bugs that I've encountered that,
had anyone tried to set up a particular very common case, could not
possibly have gone unnoticed.  However in Red Hat's defense, one thing
to realize is that the number of software components included with a
distribution like Red Hat makes it impossible to QA everything
thoroughly.  But I do still feel they could use some guidance in
chosing what subsystems probably need more rigorous testing, and what
common cases exist that sysadmins are likely to break...  

Beyond QA, I also think they do some really bizzare things with the
way they organize and configure certain things (like putting the web
server's document root in /home) that would make a lot of experienced
Unix system administrators cringe.  This is more a matter of taste and
style than QA, but I think they could use some work there too.
Thankfully, they're trying to adhere to the LSB, which eliminates a
lot of those problems, or at the very least documents them.

- -- 
Derek Martin               [EMAIL PROTECTED]    
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