[NTLUG:Discuss] Upgrading gcc libraries--best way?

[Burton Strauss]

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at ntlug.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at ntlug.org] On Behalf
Of Jack Snodgrass
Sent: Sunday, December 12, 2004 9:01 AM
To: discuss
Subject: Re: [NTLUG:Discuss] Upgrading gcc libraries--best way?

On Sun, 2004-12-12 at 08:26 -0600, John Thomas wrote:

> Any thoughts on the differences between the Fedora Core and the RH 
> "enterprise" versions?

Understand that they are aimed at two completely different audiences and
you'll be able to make your own decision.

FC was supposed to be community driven test bed.  It's not quite there yet -
it's still very much a RedHat show.  Not necessarily a bad thing - that
means a lot of testing and professionalism about the releases.

The design goals for the two are very, very different:

RedHat is designed to be a stable platform for corporate use.  And they
charge for it that way.  Things change slowly and are supported for a long
time.  Stability is EVERYTHING.

Fedora is designed to be a rapidly moving test platform for technologies
which MAY make it - someday - into RedHat.  It's free because you are
actually acting as a beta tester.  (Or maybe realistically somewhere between
beta and release).  Things change rapidly and are only supported for a short
while.  

But strictly speaking, Fedora supports ONE version at a time - with a short
grace period when a new release is out where the support both.

So you shouldn't get on the Fedora train unless you are willing to accept
that some things will break and can live with frequent OS upgrades.

Interestingly there are organizations doing the same kind of back-level
maintenance on Fedora as you were directed to for RedHat 7.3 - there is a
need for it because people chose Fedora for cost reasons (or because the
older RH ES/AS/WS releases didn't support specific hardware), but aren't
willing to ride the upgrade express.

Here's one example.  Moving from FC1 -> FC2 you had the option for SElinux.
But SElinix was implemented in a very restrictive way.  So lots of people
found their systems 'unusable'.  Did the project revert?  Nope - it's a test
bed.  We appreciate the bug reports, but if it doesn't work for you, turn it
off.  The result in FC3 is that the SElinux feature is less restrictive and
far more usable.  They clearly learned from FC2 and improved things - but
the Fedora project didn't do this (as most other distros would have) as
patches to FC2!
 
-----Burton