Fedora and the System Administrator -- Red Hat v. SuSE it is not ...
Michael K. Johnson
johnsonm at redhat.com
Fri Oct 3 17:51:53 UTC 2003
On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 01:14:32PM -0400, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> [ **NOTE: Is there any overriding reason RHEL is making the "jump" from 2.1 to
> 3.0? Are major kernel changes, like NPTL, going into the kernel? I'm just
> curious. I'm kinda wondering why this is on "2.2" since RHEL hasn't been
> around for that many versions yet. ]
Well, perhaps the taroon beta list would be a better place for that
discussion, but...
First of all: It did not jump to "3.0". There's no ".0" in it. Just
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3" with no decimal or decimal-ish part.
There are lots of changes. I think the more interesting questions would
probably be what *hasn't* changed. Yes, NPTL is in. If I tried to present
the new features here I'd miss lots of them, even in my area of the kernel.
I know that our sales force has the capability to talk about the features
that have been added.
> > And it's possible that over time, changes such as new RPM macros might
> > be added that require some changes to build on RHEL3.
>
> Er, um, that might start causing some issues. I would at least like to see
> some consistency in the package manager itself.
We're not going to avoid deploying new technology in Fedora just because
you want to be able to build Fedora packages on RHEL. :-)
If you look historically, the changes have tended to be small and
manageable most of the time.
But let's take a concrete example of a major change. Let's say, for
example, that RPM was changed so that you didn't have to list patches
in one place any apply them in another; that you could say something
like
%patch(foo-1.0-fixblah.patch) -p1
in the prep section, and RPM wouldn't need a separate
Patch0 foo=1.0-fixblah.patch
line to know that the foo-1.0-fixblah.patch file existed and should
be packaged.
We wouldn't wait until a version of RHEL had that capability to start
to use in in Fedora packages. If you wanted to rebuild the modified
packages, you'd have to modify the spec files.
> This is probably an area where Red Hat's internal developers should try
> to "advise" on. Again, it's in Red Hat's own best interest to do so, to keep
> people buying their RHEL products.
fedora-devel-list is where we'll be talking about any such changes.
> I'm looking for, more or less, the ability to add basic applications from
> Fedora to RHEL.
And it's simply not a promise we're making. It might work on a
technical basis, opportunisticaily, though if you replace RHEL3
apps with hand-built ones you'll want to check your SLA wording
to see what it does to your support level.
michaelkjohnson
"He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book."
Linux Application Development -- Ben Franklin
http://people.redhat.com/johnsonm/lad/
More information about the fedora-list
mailing list