Cris Rhea wrote:
While I agree Fedora is incredibly fast moving - with updates daily and very short cycles between "official" releases, in some ways I think you're comparing apples to oranges. Unlike RHE, SuSE, and others, you don't have to reinstall the server from scratch or do a CD based single user install to upgrade from release to release. It can be upgraded inline in multi-user via yum and done so in an a relatively non-intrusive way. I have no doubt in a "cookie cutter" installation it could be automated.If you only wish to reload the OS on your servers every couple years, then (IMHO) Fedora is a poor choice-- RHEL/CentOS would be a much better choice because of the "long-term-supported distro[s]".
In the end the version number of Fedora is a bit arbitrary and it can almost be seen as a continuum of a single constantly updated OS (again, I have a server that's gone from Fedora Core 4 to Fedora 8 very seamlessly). I see it as being more incremental than forklift upgrade.
On the other hand, while I think it isn't a bad choice for a rapid development model where you want the latest and greatest, I wouldn't recommend Fedora for most server environments. If nothing else this is true because vendors like Oracle require quantifiable releases for support and Fedora is too fluid and not certified. That said, I have seen long waits for important fixes or dependencies out of the "stable" but supposedly "supported" releases that can be quite frustrating. I can't name the number of times we've been roadblocked on fixing a major issue by the fact that something like Oracle requires us to stay with an older but supposedly "stable" OS configuration.
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