[rhelv6-beta-list] why rhel-6 still not a good choice for a programmer

[Farkas Levente]

hi,
we start to test rhel6 beta2. let's see it can be a replacement for
fedora i686 as a developer platform?
what we need?
- all development environment like gcc, java, eclipse etc.
- access to the internet like firefox, chrome, flash, skype, messaging etc.
- office at least for access ms office file format.
- virtualization support to be able to test products in different
virtual environment.


now lets see what missing:

- virtualization is only supported on 64 bit. why? why kvm is
supported on i686 on fedora but not supported on rhel? it was not
supported on the rhel 5.4 product line. it can be ok. but why still
not supported rhel-6? is there _any_ good technical reason? if yes why
it's not a reason on fedora?

then if we choose x86_64 as an arch which is an obvious chose after
the above statement, what we've to face:
- skype not working. imho skype is a must in these days. most
collaborative work on the net use skype. let's search a bit and it's
turn out that we can use skype, but we've to install a few (about a
hundreds of) other i686 packages. ok. can we do it easily? i don't
think so. first of all if we use skype's yum repo, then it'll install
it _without_ any of it's dependencies. ok it can be the fault of skype
packaging which was done by skype, but still annoying. even ldd not
working on 32bit binary just after install glibc.i686. after that a
quick
for i in `ldd skype|cut -f1 -d' '`; do yum provides */$i; done|grep i686|sort -u
be able to find the required packages which are dozens of packages.
now comes the bad part. these packages include packages which are in
conflict with the same 64bit packages.
imho redhat should have to work closely with skype team to be able to
release a working skype version for 64 bit. and it's not just the goal
of skype but should have to be rh too.

- no flash for 64 bit.

so what's the current option i686 or x86_64? both has problems. but if
rhel would support kvm on i686 the i686 would seems to be the obvious
choice.

-- 
  Levente                               "Si vis pacem para bellum!"