Overlap policy v20120615

[Bryan J Smith]

On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 1:01 PM, inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> ... based on some logic we have access to replicate are part of what
> you define to be RHEL that would be excellent ...

What I and others define with my customers as RHEL has been repeated
viewed by many as unacceptable and/or non-authoritative.  I.e., it's
why I stated prior ...

  "What I've heard is that some here will only accept a specific, actual
   statement from Red Hat on its own entitlement history. So doing such,
   which I've also done, is moot.
   I.e., we continue to have a lot of interpretation."

That drove why I said I've not only done it (many times in the past,
and most recently last week), but any effort won't be accepted,
because it's not from Red Hat, and not specifically laid out as people
want it on a public page.

It also re-affirmed why I only post technical specifics off-list to
select people.  This is not only because my work would be trashed
on-list (some has been trashed enough off-list), but a few people may
make it ... oh how can I say this ... "difficult."

E.g., several people have me utterly confused for others inside of Red
Hat, who I am not.  I also don't want anything I say to be taken as
policy, and go out-of-my-way to state historical information or
technical issues, without defining policy.

So I continue to work with people off-list.  I hope some results occur soon.

> Saying you can do it in 5 minutes but not doing it doesn't help anyone.

I say many things here that cause people to "roll their eyes," many
because people don't follow what I'm saying at all.  If you are
familiar with Red Hat Standard Operating Environment (SOE), like most
major Red Hat accounts, they make sense.  I think I used the term
"Common Knowledge" prior.  I should refine it to say "SOE Common
Knowledge."

E.g., based on my making the comment ...

  "Anyone with a RHN Satellite Server can do the entite media history from the
   Kickstartable Trees in 5 minutes"

If you have SOE Common Knowledge, you'd immediately hit those
Kickstart Trees (e.g., /var/satellite/rhn/kickstart).  You can see the
channels, the comps.xml and groupings, etc... as the media.  And since
it's RHN Satellite, you have the full history, right there,
immediately available, for every channel you've downloaded.

I hope this explains my prior, "common knowledge" statement as well.  ;)

If you're a longstanding enterprise, you likely have not only all the
way back to at least RHEL4, if not RHEL3, but likely Extended Update
Support (EUS) as well.  In fact, EUS is another, historical
consideration.

SIDE NOTE:  From a 100% technical standpoint, if you want to avoid
breakage, avoiding anything also cut for EUS is ideal.  This means all
of the AS/AP lineage, including RHEL6's HA, LB, RS (GFS2) plus
Scalable File System (XFS).  Why would we want to do that?

GFS2 and XFS are userspace with kernel dependencies.  XFS in
particular had a key, kernel-userspace change that required a
userspace change.  It's one thing for someone to pull userspace from
an EL Rebuild or upstream and get breakage, they intentionally did it.
 But it's another to see it in EPEL, or in the best case, get a
dependency issue as a result.

All I can point to is both historical lineage and technical specifics.
 But until something comes directly from Red Hat, on a redhat.com page
and is public, I know most will not be satisfied.  Hence why my
efforts have been focused on getting that, and to the specifics I've
seen stated here, to help others make policy.

> I haven't heard anyone here say that. From my perspective there just
> needs to be some reasonable logic in where the line is drawn that EPEL
> users can understand.

I've provided it and it's not enough for some.  I've accepted that and
am working with others to see if there can be a very, very specific
document released.  I don't want to say more as it's not my place, and
I continue to "stick my neck out" (which clearly a couple people want
to chop off) trying to get people what they want.

I make *0* policy.  I only try to point to things that many people
either don't understand, don't believe or otherwise feel is not
authoritative enough.  Again, I've accepted that, and am doing my best
to get something more authoritative.  From there, I'll let people
decide what they want to do.

I now go back to lurking and working on things with people off-list.


--
Bryan J Smith - Professional, Technical Annoyance