Re: Problems with Redhat 9

On Thu, Apr 10, 2003 at 02:33:02PM -0500, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom told me:
> good point. I think RH9 is just a stopgap to RH10; which will come out with
> the new kernel.

Yes, but according to the EOL announcement RH10 will also only be supported
for a year.

Where I work, we have determined the lifetime of a generic ia32 system to be
approx 3 years. That means this system will see at least 3 major revisions of
RH! Every dist is like a stopgap for the next.

> that's what we do for the systems we support. we're still maintaining some
> RH6.2 boxen; but we're going to EOL them ourselves in a month or two; just
> because getting new code to compile on old systems is becoming increasingly
> difficult. (possible, but not cost-effective).

Yes, we are thinking of doing the same. The other Unix admins here are just
saying to compile from source every-time there is a bug and they don't see what
the big deal is. I suppose you and them (except I would build RPMS instead of
just source tree installations) are right, but it just pains me to do
something like that without giving it back to the community. And if I was
going to invest that much time, I would rather just put it towards a better
solution where this won't be a problem.

Just think, if all of the people that are repacking their own fixes would
instead build the packages for an open system (a community OS), it could
easily be maintained by the community.

> sounds like you want Debian, except for the RPM-based-ness.
> I would suggest that chasing RH 'looks' will gain you little; you'll just be
> playing catchup with them all the time, and most people will have little
> incentive to switch to your distro over RH.
> (but I'm likely to be wrong). :)

You may be right on here... No-one will know until it has been released. At
this point it does not make sense to rewrite everything from scratch so it
will be based on RedHat and if it is successful, it may grow a standard of its 
own (one that the community defines).

Thanks everyone for the feedback to these ideas (both on like and off). 
Greg
-- 
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