Modern development environment on dated RHEL
Due to company's policy, our development desktop stations must have RHEL 4.7 installed on them. However, RHEL's packages are extermely out of date (for instance, it still have python 2.3, etc.), and we wish to use many up too date development tools (I'm not aiming to the bleeding edge, however a stable release from the last year seems to me a desirable goal). We mostly need user-space software (editors, scripting environment, etc.). What's the best method to 1. Use reasonably new user-space software on RHEL 4.7 2. Not to break too much the entire RHEL echosystem, or at least provide to ourselves a clear way to upgrade the foreign packages we'll install. I'm not really familiar with managing Red-Hat distribution, so any advice will be welcomed. Thanks ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Modern development environment on dated RHEL
1. Is RHEL 4.7 still being supported by RedHat, and are security patches still being made available? If yes, when is this support due to end? 2. Do you wish to use the up-to-date tools only for development, or also in software to be delivered to the customer and/or deployed in the company's operations? 3. How about installing a VM in RHEL 4.7 and doing your development in the virtual machine, using a more recent version? This will at least reduce the number of packages to be backported to RHEL 4.7 to those which are needed for running the VM. 4. How difficult would it be to change company policy? On Tue, 2010-04-27 at 09:02 +0200, Elazar Leibovich wrote: Due to company's policy, our development desktop stations must have RHEL 4.7 installed on them. However, RHEL's packages are extermely out of date (for instance, it still have python 2.3, etc.), and we wish to use many up too date development tools (I'm not aiming to the bleeding edge, however a stable release from the last year seems to me a desirable goal). We mostly need user-space software (editors, scripting environment, etc.). What's the best method to 1. Use reasonably new user-space software on RHEL 4.7 2. Not to break too much the entire RHEL echosystem, or at least provide to ourselves a clear way to upgrade the foreign packages we'll install. I'm not really familiar with managing Red-Hat distribution, so any advice will be welcomed. -- You haven't made an impact on the world before you caused a Debian release to be named after Snufkin. My own blog is at http://www.zak.co.il/tddpirate/ My opinions, as expressed in this E-mail message, are mine alone. They do not represent the official policy of any organization with which I may be affiliated in any way. WARNING TO SPAMMERS: at http://www.zak.co.il/spamwarning.html ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Modern development environment on dated RHEL
Why not compile all the latest software on some shared directory and then run it from there ... My company have policy not to give root access on development stations so I just compile all my development software in home directory and use it from there ... 2010/4/27 Elazar Leibovich elaz...@gmail.com Due to company's policy, our development desktop stations must have RHEL 4.7 installed on them. However, RHEL's packages are extermely out of date (for instance, it still have python 2.3, etc.), and we wish to use many up too date development tools (I'm not aiming to the bleeding edge, however a stable release from the last year seems to me a desirable goal). We mostly need user-space software (editors, scripting environment, etc.). What's the best method to 1. Use reasonably new user-space software on RHEL 4.7 2. Not to break too much the entire RHEL echosystem, or at least provide to ourselves a clear way to upgrade the foreign packages we'll install. I'm not really familiar with managing Red-Hat distribution, so any advice will be welcomed. Thanks ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Modern development environment on dated RHEL
2010/4/27 Elazar Leibovich elaz...@gmail.com: Due to company's policy, our development desktop stations must have RHEL 4.7 installed on them. However, RHEL's packages are extermely out of date (for instance, it still have python 2.3, etc.), and we wish to use many up too date development tools (I'm not aiming to the bleeding edge, however a stable release from the last year seems to me a desirable goal). We mostly need user-space software (editors, scripting environment, etc.). What's the best method to Use reasonably new user-space software on RHEL 4.7 Not to break too much the entire RHEL echosystem, or at least provide to ourselves a clear way to upgrade the foreign packages we'll install. I'm not really familiar with managing Red-Hat distribution, so any advice will be welcomed. Here is one: EPEL - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL Just grab the yum repo details and go. Note though that you may find that you need to update half the system, including compilers, basic libraries like glibc, whatever depends on glibc version, etc. This may not be a problem, or it may be, depending on what the limitations imposed by the company are. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | o...@goldshmidt.org ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Modern development environment on dated RHEL
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 12:33:33PM +0300, Evgeny Budilovsky wrote: Why not compile all the latest software on some shared directory and then run it from there ... My company have policy not to give root access on development stations so I just compile all my development software in home directory and use it from there ... If you go this route, you might consider using some package manager for this, such as stow (or one of its clones) or gobolinux. -- Didi ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Modern development environment on dated RHEL
Hi, I'm a Gentoo user and did it a lot of times, though using chroot. It is basically installing Gentoo into a directory. So you follow the Gentoo installation manual. You finish before the Grub installation section. Its a very straight forward procedure. Then you will have a very strong environment for a developer. If you choose to try this path, feel free to email me with any questions. I'll gladly help and share my experience. Regards, Kfir On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 12:55 PM, Yedidyah Bar-David linux...@didi.bardavid.org wrote: On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 12:33:33PM +0300, Evgeny Budilovsky wrote: Why not compile all the latest software on some shared directory and then run it from there ... My company have policy not to give root access on development stations so I just compile all my development software in home directory and use it from there ... If you go this route, you might consider using some package manager for this, such as stow (or one of its clones) or gobolinux. -- Didi ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Modern development environment on dated RHEL
1. Yes it is http://press.redhat.com/2008/07/24/red-hat-enterprise-linux-47-released-today/ 2. Only for development. We have a specific environment for deployment, compiling and testing the end product (which is a good idea anyhow IMHO. You don't want the customers be affected by a specific build issue a single developer has). 3. I'm afraid running everything with a VM will be too slow. I'm occasionally running an Ubuntu on a 2 years old laptop with Vista, and user experience is not so great. 4. I'm not sure. It's problematic since ClearCase 6 is only supported by IBM on RHEL 4.7, and we don't have new CC licenses. On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 9:24 AM, Omer Zak w...@zak.co.il wrote: 1. Is RHEL 4.7 still being supported by RedHat, and are security patches still being made available? If yes, when is this support due to end? 2. Do you wish to use the up-to-date tools only for development, or also in software to be delivered to the customer and/or deployed in the company's operations? 3. How about installing a VM in RHEL 4.7 and doing your development in the virtual machine, using a more recent version? This will at least reduce the number of packages to be backported to RHEL 4.7 to those which are needed for running the VM. 4. How difficult would it be to change company policy? On Tue, 2010-04-27 at 09:02 +0200, Elazar Leibovich wrote: Due to company's policy, our development desktop stations must have RHEL 4.7 installed on them. However, RHEL's packages are extermely out of date (for instance, it still have python 2.3, etc.), and we wish to use many up too date development tools (I'm not aiming to the bleeding edge, however a stable release from the last year seems to me a desirable goal). We mostly need user-space software (editors, scripting environment, etc.). What's the best method to 1. Use reasonably new user-space software on RHEL 4.7 2. Not to break too much the entire RHEL echosystem, or at least provide to ourselves a clear way to upgrade the foreign packages we'll install. I'm not really familiar with managing Red-Hat distribution, so any advice will be welcomed. -- You haven't made an impact on the world before you caused a Debian release to be named after Snufkin. My own blog is at http://www.zak.co.il/tddpirate/ My opinions, as expressed in this E-mail message, are mine alone. They do not represent the official policy of any organization with which I may be affiliated in any way. WARNING TO SPAMMERS: at http://www.zak.co.il/spamwarning.html ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Modern development environment on dated RHEL
It will waste a HUGE amount of time. Compiling basic software suite takes at least a single day, and it has a mental cost of managing the dependencies by hand. And you have to do that every time you update your software. It's even worse than windows non-package management system. On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 11:33 AM, Evgeny Budilovsky bud...@gmail.comwrote: Why not compile all the latest software on some shared directory and then run it from there ... My company have policy not to give root access on development stations so I just compile all my development software in home directory and use it from there ... 2010/4/27 Elazar Leibovich elaz...@gmail.com Due to company's policy, our development desktop stations must have RHEL 4.7 installed on them. However, RHEL's packages are extermely out of date (for instance, it still have python 2.3, etc.), and we wish to use many up too date development tools (I'm not aiming to the bleeding edge, however a stable release from the last year seems to me a desirable goal). We mostly need user-space software (editors, scripting environment, etc.). What's the best method to 1. Use reasonably new user-space software on RHEL 4.7 2. Not to break too much the entire RHEL echosystem, or at least provide to ourselves a clear way to upgrade the foreign packages we'll install. I'm not really familiar with managing Red-Hat distribution, so any advice will be welcomed. Thanks ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Modern development environment on dated RHEL
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 02:12:41PM +0200, Elazar Leibovich wrote: 1. Yes it is http://press.redhat.com/2008/07/24/red-hat-enterprise-linux-47-released-today/ 2. Only for development. We have a specific environment for deployment, compiling and testing the end product (which is a good idea anyhow IMHO. You don't want the customers be affected by a specific build issue a single developer has). 3. I'm afraid running everything with a VM will be too slow. I'm occasionally running an Ubuntu on a 2 years old laptop with Vista, and user experience is not so great. It wastes resources. But lets you do the real work in a sane way. 4. I'm not sure. It's problematic since ClearCase 6 is only supported by IBM on RHEL 4.7, and we don't have new CC licenses. AHHH! Only RHEL4.7 is supported. However do you think a completely modified (in a non-reproducable way) RHEL 4.7 is supported? I suspect a VM is the cheapest way. Is the problem only ClearCase itself, or the complete development environment? If only ClearCase: do you actually use it in the filesystem-like method? -- Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il || a Mutt's tzaf...@cohens.org.il || best tzaf...@debian.org|| friend ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Modern development environment on dated RHEL
Thanks for your comments. On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 3:07 PM, Tzafrir Cohen tzaf...@cohens.org.ilwrote: On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 02:12:41PM +0200, Elazar Leibovich wrote: 1. Yes it is http://press.redhat.com/2008/07/24/red-hat-enterprise-linux-47-released-today/ 2. Only for development. We have a specific environment for deployment, compiling and testing the end product (which is a good idea anyhow IMHO. You don't want the customers be affected by a specific build issue a single developer has). 3. I'm afraid running everything with a VM will be too slow. I'm occasionally running an Ubuntu on a 2 years old laptop with Vista, and user experience is not so great. It wastes resources. But lets you do the real work in a sane way. What hardware did you try that on? We're not having a very new hardware. There are other issues of course, such as interop with the real environment, etc. Although virtualbox allows you to share filesystem items between machines quite nicely. And surprise surprise, it *is* supported on RHEL 4! 4. I'm not sure. It's problematic since ClearCase 6 is only supported by IBM on RHEL 4.7, and we don't have new CC licenses. AHHH! Only RHEL4.7 is supported. However do you think a completely modified (in a non-reproducable way) RHEL 4.7 is supported? Well, if I manage not to change glibc, how can it know I'm having (say) a brand new KDE with some Qt IDE? Or that I'm using reasonably recent version of mercurial version control (yes I'm using both an agile version control which is more convenient to quickly keep many small changes, and to search through history with, and I move big baselines to the clearcase when I'm done). Or scons to build the release. I believe you can get a reasonably modern development environment to live within the RHEL space. The only thing I fear is managing it. I suspect a VM is the cheapest way. Is the problem only ClearCase itself, or the complete development environment? No, just Clearcase. If only ClearCase: do you actually use it in the filesystem-like method? Do you mean the MVFS? Yes we do, but I'm by no means a ClearCase expert, so I'll be glad to hear of other methods. -- Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il || a Mutt's tzaf...@cohens.org.il || best tzaf...@debian.org|| friend ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Modern development environment on dated RHEL
Elazar Leibovich wrote: On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 3:07 PM, Tzafrir Cohen tzaf...@cohens.org.il mailto:tzaf...@cohens.org.il wrote: 4. I'm not sure. It's problematic since ClearCase 6 is only supported by IBM on RHEL 4.7, and we don't have new CC licenses. AHHH! Only RHEL4.7 is supported. However do you think a completely modified (in a non-reproducable way) RHEL 4.7 is supported? Well, if I manage not to change glibc, how can it know I'm having (say) a brand new KDE with some Qt IDE? Or that I'm using reasonably recent version of mercurial version control (yes I'm using both an agile version control which is more convenient to quickly keep many small changes, and to search through history with, and I move big baselines to the clearcase when I'm done). Or scons to build the release. I believe you can get a reasonably modern development environment to live within the RHEL space. The only thing I fear is managing it. I suspect a VM is the cheapest way. Is the problem only ClearCase itself, or the complete development environment? No, just Clearcase. If only ClearCase: do you actually use it in the filesystem-like method? Do you mean the MVFS? Yes we do, but I'm by no means a ClearCase expert, so I'll be glad to hear of other methods. clearcase has two major modes of operation. one of them allows you to see any changes made to the repositories instantly as they are made - this requires your development OS to be supported by clearcase. this form uses clearcase's kernel code to show you a virtual file system that takes its files from the clearcase repository on-the-fly. the other reuires you to work like any other source control software - perform a rebase or checkout or other operations to see the changes made to the source. in this later case, you get copies of the code onto a normal file system. in the later case, you can use clearcase on other systems, or alternatively, export the file system from a RHEL 4.7 system, via NFS - and so run the development tools on a different machine. in the former case - i don't know if clearcase supports exporting its special file system via NFS to clients. if it does - this might give you the option of running the dev tools on a newer system, and only run the build operation on the RHEL 4.7 system. --guy ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
