I've been talking on and off with a couple of people about where to base our operating system. Over the last couple of months we've been following Rawhide, which hasn't been a walk in the park. (It's development, so things have broken from time to time.) FC6 is going to be released in a couple of days, so we've been talking a little bit about where to go. Do we:

1. Stop with FC6 and use that as a basis for development

2. Follow FC7 development and expect that the timeline for FC7 will line up with our shipping schedules (which isn't an unreasonable assumption given that FC7 will be today + 6 months, I believe.) [1]

3. Use FC6 + the RHEL5 kernel. Maximum kernel focus (hundreds of engineers can't be wrong - right?), security updates are easy, things don't move much.

I had originally been a big fan of 3 (FC6 + RHEL5 kernel) but I think that others have talked me into using 1 (FC6.) The main reasons being:

o The kernel will move a little faster (including rebases) and we're still in development. It's not time to draw in the reins quite yet on the kernel.[2]

o The kinds of places where the RHEL5 kernel will see changes are largely in things we never touch. i.e. lots of big storage drivers, VM changes for large systems and things like that. Plus, we'll get security updates for at least a year, probably more. No guarantees on timing, of course, but they will be there.

o FC6 is easy for everyone involved to install and it's a solid base for software development. A known good.

2 (FC7) as an option hasn't appealed to me because it's too much movement at this time. We're somewhere between polish and development and we can pull in what we need from FC7 into our private OLPC repositories. This won't scale forever and at some point we might need to pull the FC7 trigger, but I think that we'll be able to cross that bridge when we come to it.

Thoughts?

--Chris

1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Core/Schedule

2. http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/56869.html
_______________________________________________
Devel mailing list
[email protected]
http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/devel

Reply via email to