On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 10:17 AM, jtd jtd@mtnl.net.in wrote:
On Thursday 31 March 2011 07:32:36 Raj Mathur (राज माथुर) wrote:
On Wednesday 30 Mar 2011, Kshitiz wrote:
Help me solve this puzzle based on your varied preferences: Yes, we deploy High Availability file server and mirror for small & medium enterprises, so yes: production environment.
- CentOS or Debian?
I heard that CentOS is losing developers, which is not good news for a community-supported OS. If that is true, then CentOS would be that much lower in the list of preferred FOSS server operating systems. Can someone please confirm or deny the rumour?
The recent mangling of patches by RH may have something to do with it (if true).
AFAIK, that really does not affect centos, since centos usually do not mess with the patches that RedHat releases in each of their kernels, they just do an rpm rebuild. The Mangling of patches is squarely targeted at OEL, since it will make it more expensive for them to steal RedHat's support clients since they will now have to allocate developers to either patch the kernels from scratch or reverse engineer which patches among the ones RedHat and others submit upstream are in this specific kernel release. Note, RedHat are still submitting the patches upstream individually, so with a few really good devs, the reverse engineering process CAN be done.
In terms of losing devs, its hard to say, since centos was always rather loosely knit. However, the slow progress on http://wiki.centos.org/QaWiki/6/AuditStatus does not make me feel good about a timely 6.0 release. In any case, I've seen that for most installs, unless they are internet facing, i can live with Fedora on the server. Yes it means i do a yearly upgrade, but it's a small price to pay, especially now that fedora's upgrades mean very little downtime and are smoother than ever.
Regards R. K. Rajeev
But goes to show that given a need to grow profits, (and all the corollaries that go with it), it is best to avoid a "corporate distro" if you are not paying them for the support.
IMO debian is the only suitable distro due to the politics of business and technology.
-- Rgds JTD -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers