On Fri, 13 May 2011, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > Any CentOS users here? I'm hoping the tales of woe are overblown, > and CentOS is still healthy and moving forwards. If something > happens to SL, I would rather not have RHEL as the only practical > alternative.
My best understanding of the issues besetting CentOS right now is that there are at least three issues: First, Red Hat released RHEL 4.9, RHEL 5.6, and RHEL 6.0 within a short period of time. CentOS decided to go after the 4.9 and 5.6 point releases before focusing solely on 6.0. So CentOS has released *final* versions of 4.9 and 5.6, but not 6.0. SL chose a different priority set, so it's released 6.0 and 4.9 but not 5.6. Second, for CentOS developers, 100% binary compatibility is required for a release. That means that every library and executable will have exactly the same linking and dependencies as RHEL. Running ldd against a library on CentOS will show the exact same dependencies as the same library on RHEL. SL aims for a bit broader target, and the dependencies aren't tracked as exactly. Third, CentOS has suffered from a transparency issue. Some devs have made some strides in this area lately, but all too often the wider CentOS user community has little or no understanding of how much progress has (or hasn't) been made toward any given release. That said, CentOS is alive and well. I'm sure that SL 6 has been taken up by its share of disappointed CentOS expatriots. It'll be interesting to see if they stay in the SL camp after CentOS 6 hits the streets. -- Paul Heinlein <> [email protected] <> http://www.madboa.com/ _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
