Re: Problems with Redhat 9

On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 05:31:59PM -0400, Jef Spaleta told me:
> unmotivated as in not worth upgrading from rh 8? I'm not sure if there
> are any earth shattering reasons to upgrade for servers. But as a home
> desktop experience...my usb scanner is supported now...they made an
> effort to clean up the gnome menu layout. But a couple of high profile
> problems like the rpm hang thing is still out there...lurking, besides
> the obvious nptl related gotchas.

Unmotivated, because:

   - I am just going to have to upgrade them in another year.
   - I don't want to use my systems as RedHat's unstable test bed for the RH 
     pay product line.
   - I have always stayed away from Dot-Uh-Oh releases, and we just went from
     one to another!
   - I have just finished convincing scientists, some local EDU's and Coms that
     RedHat is the best, easiest to maintain (with respect to not having to
     touch the systems to keep cost low), most cost effective solution out 
     there (now I have to take that back).
   - I have to reinstall about 70 production systems before January 1st (total 
     EOL'ed RH systems by Jan in our organization is approx 500). (this also
     means I don't have time to do things like GRAB)
   - I feel like RH has tied my hands, and is using their market share to push
     a product (sounds a bit like M$ to me)
   - Another project I maintain relies on RedHat heavily (Warewulf), and the
     thought of having to constantly keep up with the nodefs really bugs me.

There are more, but this is a good summation. I know what the obvious answers 
to many of these items are:

   - build the fixes myself
   - get updates from elsewhere on the net
   - buy their product
   - just upgrade

but I feel that I should not have to do any of this for a free Operating 
System where the work is already being done by developers and maintainers in 
the community. Also, most of these solutions will work in my environment. I
can explain why off list if anyone is interested.

Maybe I am just an Open Source bigot/purist which is why I am having a
problem with RH's change in direction. I know that RedHat does a lot for the
community, and it is appreciated but it won't keep my systems current and
secure. 

RedHat just reiterated to me why I don't purchase proprietary software. I
don't know what the corporate agenda is, nor am I comfortable with most 
companies stability and decisions. A corporation may decide to completely 
change the support/development model overnight, and we can only hang on for 
the ride.

IMHO, a community solution is the answer. Community software should be managed
by the community! Unfortunately there are no distribution candidates that fit 
this niche (niche being: community driven, main stream, RH lookalike (for
vendor support and ease of maintenance), RPM based, etc...). Actually there is
enough local support from people that I have talked to that we are actually 
thinking of starting a community base OS based on RedHat (for now). Probably
it would use Fedora for non-base OS packages... Nothing has been formally
released, but we are already working on code! If this project interests you, 
please contact me (OS developers/hackers, documentists, testers, etc...).

Sorry for the rant, it is just that this is driving me crazy. I have to build
4 clusters by the end of the year, and I am still fighting with the question
(What OS should I install?)! Our standard last month was RedHat 7.3 for all
servers, but that means that we will have to upgrade to 9 by Jan! Considering
many of the applications that need to run on the cluster don't even work with
RedHat 8 yet, I am guessing this will be a problem. :) This is not something 
that I should have to even think of unless I was talking of something several 
years old.

> No repositories, thats okay...get in bed with the fedora project and
> I'll forgive you....well actually, get grab to work with either yum or
> apt repos generally and I'll forgive you.

When is Fedora supposed to get underway? I know they have a tree out now, but
it is does not support < 8.

> -jef"lets see if i can get this box on rhl9 now too"spaleta

Have fun!
Greg
-- 
/* Greg Kurtzer, Open Source Developer
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