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Fedora and long term support

Fedora and long term support

Posted Oct 18, 2008 19:54 UTC (Sat) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: Fedora and long term support by nicku
Parent article: Fedora and long term support

> I find it surprising that Wikipedia ever considered using Fedora as a
> server platform.

The wikipedia article has been widely misreported and taken out of context by fanboys with axes to grind.

What it basically says is that wikipedia has experienced explosive growth, moving from a size where it's ok to use a small set of cobbled together servers with heterogeneous systems (their mix included Fedora, old Red Hat Linux, etc) to a size where this heterogeneous mix is prohibitively expensive to maintain (well known situation in any big org).

So at one time they had to say "anything but this mix of heterogeneous stuff, we'll take *one* option and use it everywhere". And then they gave this article stating how nice it was to have a single system to support, now they've gotten rid of the old mismatched stuff.

Their single option happened to be Ubuntu LTS, but there's precious little in the article suggesting Centos (or a BSD, or OSX) wouldn't have been as good for their needs.

I guess "wikipedia consolidates on a single system, saves admin time" would not have made the headlines. But there's nothing more to see in there.


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Fedora and long term support

Posted Oct 18, 2008 21:08 UTC (Sat) by nevyn (subscriber, #33129) [Link]

There are quotes like this from the CTO of wikipedia, saying basically they were heavily pre-disposed to Ubuntu. Which is fine, they are basically supporting something themselves so whatever they happen to prefer is best in some ways.

But, to me, it heavily implies that no matter what Fedora or CentOS or RHEL had done, they'd never have won them over at this point in time ... which makes reading through the 3rd incarnation of this flamewar particularly worthless.

Fedora and long term support

Posted Oct 20, 2008 9:22 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

The FAQ wikipedia put on the subject basically confirms they had admins that were used to Debian. So a derivative made sense for Wikipedia, though they could have been badly burned by jumping on LTS before the LTS process had proven itself (and it still needs a few years before it proves it can deliver as well as RHEL/Centos' nice track record. The last years are the harder in any long term cycle).

It also points yum was less nice than apt two years ago, which may or may not be still true (since yum has been in rapide development since).

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