On Thursday 14 August 2008 23:37:22 Donald A. Tevault wrote: > On the other hand, if the exam is to be truly "distro-agnostic", then > you might still have a good point, since I don't know if other distros > are using other locations for the "gdm" and "kdm" directories. (But > then, the exam isn't truly "distro-agnostic" now, since the only package > systems it covers are the Red Hat and Debian/Ubuntu package systems.)
I think "distro-agnostic" is a lofty, well-intentioned but utterly unachievable goal to strive for. There is no such thing as a default abstract distro that can be used as a reference platform, there are only real ones with quirks :-) The closest we have to an upstream default distro is Slackware, which makes a big thing out of making the minimum possible changes to upstream defaults, and then only to ensure that the thing works. I don't know how many LPI candidates use Slack frequently, but I'm sure it's not statistically significant. "distro-agnostic" is a nice fuzzy term we can gladly put in the promo material, but amongst ourselves we know that "not specific distro-focused" is the actual truth. RH and derivatives/Debian and derivatives has the lion's share of the Linux market that LPI aims for. If our exams verify that the candidate actually does know how to get both those systems running, then we have measured something very useful. Consider this: Assume someone is highly proficient with Gentoo but clueless on RH/Debian. Also assume LPI is truly distro-agnostic and this person has earned an LPI cert. He's somewhat at sea with RH/Debian though (much like LPI certified people find FreeBSD mostly familiar but also different enough to be confusing). Now, can a hiring manager consider this person to be truly certified in this thing called LINUX when you take the realities of the real world into account? That's a hypothetical scenario, probably not achievable. But if we did pull it off, or even tried, would it not devalue the position LPI currently holds and undo the last 8 years of work in a big way? > Alan McKinnon wrote: > >And that's a very excellent thing. There are many people and > >institutions out there that would like to go with Red Hat but can't > >right now - usually for license cost reasons. Centos gives them a > >proving ground and an upgrade path to eventually get there. > > The most high-profile example I've heard of is the San Francisco > Chronicle. Last year, they decided to upgrade from the Red Hat 6 that > they were running, but couldn't afford the support contract for RHEL. > So, they switched to CentOS, instead. The lead distributor for RH in this country quite freely recommends Centos to any customer who balks at RH pricing and also doesn't have corporate governance rules to comply with. He's crunched the numbers and can show that this makes excellent business sense. It also increases sales, and they've been in this game for 13 years and plan to stay the distance. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com _______________________________________________ lpi-examdev mailing list lpi-examdev@lpi.org http://list.lpi.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lpi-examdev
