I fail to see how any of these are SL problems. You can use any of the filesystems you like. Which libraries and packages are provided and compatible with other software are a function of what Redhat provides, and as others have noted, the point of RHEL (upon which SL is based) is to provide a long-term-stable, supported OS. If you need current libraries, packages, utilities, APIs, etc., you use something like Fedora. We run into this all the time with browsers (for instance) but since the third party apps our developers use are based on RHEL, we must use RHEL or a derivative. -Miles
Begin forwarded message: From: MAH Maccallum <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: January 7, 2019 at 06:16:35 CST To: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>, "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: Planning for hypothetical RHEL/CentOS cancellation This certainly an interesting issue, but I have been less pleased with SL than Keith is. The main problems have come with software that is not in SL's standard set, generally because SL does not have the needed libraries or supporting packages. For example I cannot currently use Dropbox under SL although I have manually re-partitioned and re-formatted to use ext4 rather than xfs, since Dropbox insists on ext4. The error message tells me I do not have glibc 2.19, and advises I should update to Ubuntu 14.04+ or Fedora 21+ Often there's a workaround using other repos' contents to get necessary libraries etc., but when I look for info on the net the available advice is, like that above, most often for Ubuntu and secondly a recent Fedora. An example of software I would like to use is an up-to-date gramps, while examples of things I do use but which are not in the standard SL distribution are Texlive 2018 (SL's distributed texlive seems quite old) and MATE (from epel, which works but with some flaky bits, notably the power-manager and the keyboard configuration) Malcolm On 05/01/2019 23:43, Keith Lofstrom wrote: I do not expect an RHEL/CentOS cancellation in my lifetime. I expect IBM will keep them thriving and available for a very long time. However, big companies can do stupid things, and cancelling RHEL, or ending "free" CentOS, is something a clueless IBM CEO might attempt someday. I am designing systems that others will maintain and upgrade for decades. A reluctant switchover to, say, Debian is easier to manage now than later. I hope that will NEVER be necessary. Debian could be mismanaged as well; this happened with X and Gnome. I rely on Scientific Linux and variants because large organizations like Fermilabs and CERN and LIGO do. I hope these organizations have contingency plans. I assume that if IBM behaves badly in the future, our international community will grumble, plead, and then fork, keeping systems like RPM and yum functional for approximately forever. Is this a prudent assumption? Keith
