Michael Mansour wrote:
I remember when first looking at all this after Fedora became unmanageable for
me in the enterprise. I originally looked at Whitebox Linux (yes early days
I'm talking), Tao, Scientific Linux and CentOS.
I personally have/maintain one WBEL4, several CentOS{4.5} and SL5 systems.
The reason I chose Scientific Linux was simple, stability. My highest priority
was to have an OS which was rock solid and didn't require me to spend the
large part of my life fixing it, maintaining it, patching it and upgrading it.
Why didn't I choose CentOS? a couple of reasons:
* CentOS would immediately re-package and release updates straight after Red
Hat, bugs and all. SL would perform further tests meaning I had something more
stable and tested than what Red Hat and CentOS would release. Saving me heart
ache, stress and time.
If one does not fix a bug, it continues to be a bug in one's system.
Whenever one makes a change, there is some possibility of introducing a
new problem (and I've just been bitten by this on a CentOS4 system).
However, if one installs bug fixes as they become available then one has
fewer bugs than otherwise.
This is fixed in C5, not in SL5:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=455271
* at the time CentOS forced upgrades to the latest released Red Hat Updates
kits. This meant that when I ran, say, CentOS 4.1, and CentOS 4.2 was out,
CentOS would no longer package and release the errata for 4.1. SL would
closely follow the same support regime as Red Hat, which supports releases for
8 years (although SL committed to 3, which is still ok), no matter what update
kit/release you're running. I don't want to be forced to do anything
especially in enterprise production environments where things cannot go wrong.
Unless Connie and Troy roll their own fixes, the only source of fixes is
Red Hat. Their only choices are to release fixes sourced from RH ASAP,
or to delay them.
I note that SL5 has the same version of firefox as C5.2 has (3.0) - C5.1
has firefox 1.5.
Whether the latest SL5 calls itself 5.0 (its release file here syas 5.0)
or 5.2, there are good reasons to have the same versions of software as
the latest RHEL5:
Upstreams are only interested in supporting its latest stable versions,
supporting five-year-old software isn't their concern, it's the concern
of whomever ships it: RH, CentOS, SL. If RH doesn't care to devote
resources to supporting old software, SL and CentOS certainly can't.
Besides, doing so breaks compatibility with RH, and at least for CentOS
that's critical.
Mozilla in particular is picky about what constitutes "firefox,"
"thunderbird" etc. If they haven't approved code changes, it's not
"firefox" or "thunderbird." For this reason, Debian doesn't ship
packages called "firefox" or "thunderbird." (Debian is very picky about
getting security fixes out the door promptly).
If you have a new system on which you want to install SL4 or SL3, likely
you will need new drivers.
Now, if there's a problem in CentOS4.0, there will be a fix: it's unfair
to say otherwise. It might mean you cherry-pick the latest integrated
update and updates thereto, or you might just let "yum upgrade" do its
thing. Your choice.
Since making the decision to go SL over CentOS I've never looked back. I use
repo's from Dag/Dries, ATrpms, EPEL and even CentOS extras/plus and
utterramblings (when I really need them for clients). But the point is, the
approaches's were different for both CentOS and SL when I was looking at this
years ago, and I needed/preferred the SL approach over the CentOS approach.
Of course, by using all those additional sources of software, one
forfeits what you see as stability. Especially as those don't all play
nice together (I recall seeing complaints that the latest, EPEL, didn't
play nice with the others, after the others had made efforts to be
compatible and (maybe) integrate at rpmforge.)
If someone packages postgresql 8.3 for RHEL4 you could well get it
accidentally (something of that kind did happen to me).
--
Cheers
John
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