WARNING:DO NOT UPGRADE TO CORE 4

[harald kapper]

Fred Morcos schrieb:
> well, im not against steven, fc3 is way much better than fc4.. i still 
> experience hell a lot of problems in fc4 even after upgrading the whole 
> system.. i dont know why all this happened, is it such bad testing? or 
> the fedora team giving up on the project?? things/problems that happen 
> aren't suppose to be happening.. i mean, fedora core 4 till now cant be 
> a usable system anywhere (home, office, server, etc..)
> no offence but i think that fc4 needs a lot more attention for the next 
> 2 months to get everything tested, fixed and optimized as good as 
> possible...
> im wishing them good luck
> -fred
> 

hi
imho this is a logical situation *yes* *really* no_joke.

fedora is - by the idea of redhat - the area of 
bleeding-edge-development, where new things get introduced and tested.
"they" simply rebase the kernelsource and apply patches and then this 
kernel gets released - by the feedback of hundreds or thousands of users 
redhat learns about their software and profit from the testing-process, 
while "we" get a free solution and software, that we can use as we like 
- now I have nothing against this deal - and the alternatives if you 
don't like this deal are out there - just search for another distro :)

the latest enterprise linux was basically a fork out of fc3-testing, in 
other words three development and testing cycles with a public userbase 
in the tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands after their initial fork 
  from good old RH9 / RHEL3. So it was in fact time for anybody who 
wants a stable system to either move to RHEL4 or plan for upgrading 
his/her systems with either fedoralegacy or by themselves or by whatever 
other means.

now we all (I suspect) run more or less critical systems on fedora 
(otherwise the testing would not be that good) and there is some reason 
behind the late upgrading of critical servers - eg. our fedora based 
webservers simply went from fc2 to fc3 a few weeks ago when fc2 retired 
and we had enough information about fc3 gathered that we knew our 
upgrades would go fine (and yet someone also forgot about the split-off 
of php-gd from the core php-package).

on the other hand we still have systems running rh7, rh9 and even rh6 - 
from mail to dns servers up to authentication servers (but hey those 
boxes are well contained behind firewalls) and I guess like any other 
decent sysadmin I can only advise you to plan migration, evaluate new 
systems and simply forget about "ah new version - lets upgrade" :)

the only reason besides its being free for us to go core were the newer 
libraries and especially web-developers do force us to have webservers 
running the latest bells and whistles (ok I stop whining), but I'd never 
even evaluate a not 100% supported system for critial services that 
people start yelling at me if they don't work 24x7 - whereas webservers 
in farms I still can turn a few off without a lot of complaints (but 
thats me) for upgrading for a few minutes.

so in the redhat perspective I'd say fc4 is the newest and latest 
testground (we have php5, new mysql and lots of other fancy stuff) and 
whoever tried this first without testing - well - should probably 
consider another job except sysadmin. and I like this, but we just did 
upgrade to fc3 and will stay here for a while, in fact we will fork lots 
of boxes to rhel4 in order to maintain a php4 base and as we see fc4 
mature we will probably move servers up.

my 15 minutes :)

best
harald kapper / http://kapper.net