Once upon a time, Michael Torrie <[email protected]> said: > There's always Fedora then---RH EL is not for everone. Or are you > saying RH should release a new version every year or so but support each > and every old version for 6 years?
No, I don't expect a release every 12 months. The problem is that the release cycle is getting longer with each release: RHEL 3 -> RHEL 4: 16 months RHEL 4 -> RHEL 5: 25 months RHEL 5 -> RHEL 6: ? - 35 months and counting (at least 3-6 months yet?) When will RHEL 7 be, 2015? The software versions in RHEL 5 are out-of-date at this point (and many have been for some time). BIND doesn't fully support DNSSEC (which is going into widespread production use fast), so I'm going to have to build and maintain my own BIND packages. PHP is ancient (but rebuilding that requires rebuilding most or all of the PHP stack). I'm using sendmail and Dovecot, and I'm having to build and maintain them myself because RHEL 5 is so far behind (shipping a sendmail verion almost 4 years old). This list goes on from there. I have a few DEC Alpha servers still kicking around, running Tru64 Unix. The last Tru64 release was over 7 years ago, and Alphas are EOL. Yet HP still releases periodic updates, and they've managed (with what I'm sure are limited resources) to update things like BIND and sendmail to newer versions over time. Tru64 also supported in-place version upgrades, unlike RHEL, so if you were running 5.0A and really needed something in 5.1B, you didn't have to format the drive or build a new system (rolling updates in a cluster means users never even see an outage). I have Alphas that are over 10 years old still running fine; I'm working on replacing them mainly due to hardware support (contract costs and difficulty in getting spares). Red Hat is putting a lot of effort into Fedora development, but not much of that is making back into the commercial product in a timely fashion. I'd like Red Hat to maybe look at "mature" Fedora releases (e.g. at least 6-9 months after release) and evaluate some packages like BIND for inclusion in RHEL updates. It doesn't have to be every package or every Fedora release, but get RHEL moving just a little bit faster than the dinosaur RHEL 5 is turning into. Maybe use additional channels to get updated lines available. If I have to maintain a significant number of major packages myself, tracking bugs, security updates, etc., why should I continue paying for RHEL? -- Chris Adams <[email protected]> Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble. _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
