-snip- < 1) RHEL 3.x is not LSB 3.0 compatible, whereas RHEL 4.2+ and SLE 9.3+ are. < Would this affect a significant portion of the current zLinux installed population?
As others have said, no. -snip- < 2) For non-LSB3.0 environments, we would have instructions on how to do a source RPM install or a source tarball "make/make install". < Even though the build is simple, will this be a issue with some z Linux customers? It will be a problem for almost all of them. I.e., those that didn't recruit their midrange Linux folks to do the support on the mainframe. < Based on feedback, we can really decide to ship the package formats that users seem to want/need, but we would *really* like to keep the binary packages to a small number. You should ship binary RPM packages for SLES and RHEL, .deb packages for Debian/390, and .tgz packages for Slack/390, should you choose to support them. Doing anything else is going to cause you enormous amounts of support headaches, and hence a lot of added costs and customer dissatisfaction. < We would like to be able to use a single zLinux image to build binary packages. Not easy to do, even following Rick Troth's suggestions. You'd be much better off getting z/VM, if you don't already have it, and creating multiple guests. < It would be *ideal* for us to just ship source packages, but our intuition is that no matter how simple the build process, some customers will only want binaries (the opposite of my preference :-) I would say that 99.999% of your potential customers will want only binary packages. They're not in the business of being developers, they're converted systems programmers or system administrators. If they're smart (and most of them are) they won't have any unnecessary packages installed on their systems, to keep patching to a minimum. That means no development tools unless it's a development system, etc. Most of the people that wind up supporting Linux/390 systems don't have the background and skills to be at all comfortable building packages from source. Even those that do, don't want to spend the time to have to do it. If it doesn't install and start running (with whatever required configuration is really necessary) they're going to hate it. Mark Post ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
