On 5/23/05, Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
[ snips ]
> On Mon, 2005-05-23 at 11:38 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> > I take it you didn't run CIPE vpn's among any of those 30 machines or
> > you'd still be on FC1.
>
> Actually, Fedora Core 2 wasn't the only distro that dropped it.
> There were a lot of issues with CIPE and kernel 2.6 -- many that were
> not solved in the first 6 months of 2.6's release, by the time Fedora
> Core 2 came out. The first half-way reliable patches were for 2.6.6,
> which was a month after about Fedora Core 2 came out (with 2.6.5).
>
I'm sure other releases had the same problem, but it doesn't warm the
cockles of my heart that RedHat settled on a very early 2.6 release.
2.6 was cleaner than even numbered kernels in the past, but even so
that's way too early, unless you have a paraallel effort to
reintegrate the kernel when more things have been fixed. I'm not a
CIPE user, but I can certainly understand the gripes.
> People today are still bitching about the
> GLibC 2.0 change of Red Hat Linux 5.0, and the forced ANSI C++
> compliance with the adoption of GCC 2.96/3.0 in Red Hat Linux 7.
>
Yep, when you (by means of your choices) break lots of things, people
will gripe. And I believe RedHat justifiably has a reputation for
pushing not-quite-cooked software into a production release (whether
you call it .0 or not).
> Like adopting kernel 2.6, which Fedora Core 2 did. I still haven't seen
> a so-called "Fedora Core 2-only" problem. It's typically been kernel
> 2.6,,,
That's just semantics. If you base your release on an unproven kernel
release, you get to take the flack when it breaks. Personally, I
expect things to break in Fedora releases because it's the labrat
environment for the enterprise releases.
More problematic for me (and CIPE users) is the decision in the latest
enterprise releases to drop support for quite a few functions that
people (rightly or wrongly) have come to rely on - CIPE, LVM, XFS
filesystem, Reiserfs filesystem, etc., etc. I don't have the full
picture, but there's some kind of a problem with the versioning of
OpenLDAP/OpenSSL in REHL4=CentOS4. That's something my firm has to
sort out before moving off RH9 with LDAP authentication. And of course
there's the brand spanking new LVM2 which came out without support for
extending a filesystem. That, too, is a major sticking point for our
RH9 systems deployed with LVM (working flawlessly on RH9).
It makes you wonder: does RedHat ever solicit input from its customer
base before making these left turns? Wouldn't you as a paying customer
expect something better? I could expect this type behavior from a
non-commercial distro. We the public always gripe when M$ leaves users
behind with a new non-compatible Winxx or M$Office release, but does
Linux really have a better track record?
I give heartfelt thanks to the CentOS developers who are trying to
plug some of the holes.
--
Collins
Head teachers of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but
the Start button.
