On Tue, 2009-11-24 at 00:13 -0700, Bryan Murdock wrote: > I can kind of see where you RHEL defenders are coming from for servers > (kind of), but try RHEL Workstation, where you do want extra packages > like git or a more recent python and it is teh suX0rz. I say kind of > for servers because you might want to run subversion 1.5 because it > finally does merges somewhat correctly, or set up django, or ruby on > rails, and wo be unto you if so. You start to wonder really quickly > what it is you are paying for. > > Ubuntu, even up through the latest 9.10 has been very good to me.
If Ubuntu 9.10 can meet your needs, you shouldn't have been using RHEL. RHEL is about stability and long term support. If you're okay with major upgrades every 6 to 12 months, RHEL has nothing to offer. On the other hand, if you want your dev environment to match a RHEL prod environment, switching to Ubuntu is kinda silly. A workstation isn't a desktop. As a general rule of thumb, if the user of a system has the root password, that isn't a workstation. It is normal to custom build a handful of critical packages for an enterprise distro, but not always necessary. The latest version of Django, for example, is available from EPEL. When you pay for RHEL, you aren't paying for the latest Django version. You're paying so that your custom Web app using a custom compiled Django won't break when some yahoo decides to switch to push out a new version of Python or ImageMagick or postgresql-libs or whatever. Think of it like a home. When you're in college, moving every six months isn't a big deal. Once you have a family, though, most people settle down. They carefully research the market and buy a house. No one would claim they weren't getting their money's worth just because they had to rearrange the furniture or repaint the walls once in awhile. So why complain about a couple of custom packages? On the other hand, if you have to custom build more than a handful of packages, you're doing something wrong. (BTW, Subversion? You're complaining about old software and you're still using Subversion?!) -- "XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve your problem, you aren't using enough of it." - Chris Maden -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info (unsubscribe here): http://uug.byu.edu/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
