Re: problems with the concept of unstable -> testing
On Wednesday 17 December 2008 10:55, Tzafrir Cohen <tzafrir@cohens.org.il>
wrote:
> > The Fedora vs RHEL model that Red Hat uses has some benefits.
>
> The Fedora and RHEL is:
>
> Fedora: a somewhat equivalent of Debian Testing. The rules for updating
> a package even after a version is released are way more laxed than
> Debian Stable.
In terms of the requirements for version updates, Debian/Testing and Fedora
are quite similar. Debian/Testing is often suggested for home (not
corporate) desktop use and Fedora is the home desktop system from Red Hat.
> RHEL: Much less software. You can't expect to maintain the whole
> archive of Debian Stable for 5 or 7 years without it. There are many
> packages I miss in the CentOS archive.
True.
There are a number of possibilities for alleviating this. One suggestion that
has been made is to split Debian into different sections with different
release requirements. One possible way of doing this is to have one section
for core and server software which would also be the base for a Fedora-like
distribution and the entire package list for a CentOS/RHEL like distribution.
One possibility if we were to have a Debian equivalent to CentOS/RHEL would be
to have apt sources repositories from newer distributions. Having a system
with most packages coming from a stable binary package set and a couple of
missing packages compiled from a source base such as Debian/Testing should
give a good result.
If I could find a good set of package sources that would build on CentOS then
my CentOS sys-admin work would be a lot easier.
> Also note that none of those distribution has a distinction between
> "server" and "desktop" in the release cycle management. Ubuntu has a
> "server" variant, but it is merely a way to package different packages
> and defaults into the installation CD. RHEL has a distinction between
> "server" and "desktop", but I figure that this is because supporting a
> server instance costs more (or that people are willing to pay more for
> it).
The various versions of RHEL have different price-points and different package
sets. Pay more money and more server packages are supported.
The recommended use of Fedora is desktops not servers. While desktop
environments are supported in RHEL, this tends to be mostly centrally managed
corporate desktops not individual one-off systems - so it's a similar
situation to servers in terms of a resource being centrally managed by the IT
group. You can consider the release cycle difference between Fedora and RHEL
to be the difference between desktop and server systems.
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