On 02/24/2011 05:43 PM, Ross Walker wrote: > On Feb 24, 2011, at 9:31 AM, Johnny Hughes <johnny@xxxxxxxxxx > <mailto:johnny@xxxxxxxxxx>> wrote: > >> I am not saying this to be a smart a$$ or be negative ... just saying >> that other enterprise distributions exist that provide long term >> stability without backports ... Unbuntu LTS is a free example. They >> also provide integration of all their system libraries and audit their >> software for security compliance. > > I think the primary driving factor for Redhat to employ the backport > method is to maintain a stable ABI across a release, and the primary > reason for that is for third party application support. > > Redhat wants to provide a platform for which commercial vendors can > develop their wares such that they can say it supports RHEL 5 or 6 and > it will actually run on said platform without loss of functionality or > stability. > > I doubt the same can be said about Ubuntu LTS or even SLES where a > change in a library can result in either the third party application not > working or working with limited functionality. That is absolutely true and I agree with you 100% ... I like the constant ABI across the release and the backport model, otherwise I would be building "something else". But I also know that there are people who think backporting is the "Devil". I was only trying to provide sane advise for those people ... I think it is much safer (and more stable) to use unbuntu than to try and build your own latest bind and your own latest ssh and your own latest apache and your own latest php and "other stuff" and then bolt that into CentOS. If you start breaking the constant ABI and introducing lots of new shared libs, etc, then you are totally negating the only 2 things (ABI and stability) that makes CentOS an enterprise OS. You are even likely better off using Fedora than trying to replace massive parts of CentOS with newer stuff. Now ... I have done some custom things myself (like roll in Samba 3.4.x for Windows 7 PDC support into c4 and c5 and CentOS 5 LDAP in CentOS 4 so I could add new C5 machines as Domain controllers in new offices with some older C4 machines as domain controllers in the old offices without having to replace the older OSes). So, with limited changes, it is possible.
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