RHEL 6: already obsolete ? [LWN.net]

RHEL 6: already obsolete ?

Posted Apr 22, 2010 8:06 UTC (Thu) by danieldk (guest, #27876)
In reply to: RHEL 6: already obsolete ? by airlied
Parent article: RHEL 6 beta version available

You mean the splendid QA process that let through changes to RHEL5(.0) that kills network completely on any machine with a Xen kernel and two network interfaces? And then after reporting it through Bugzilla (iirc the fix was a one-liner), you have to wait one quarter until the next release, because that one line change needs to go through QA again?

In the months I have helped CentOS as a volunteer (and used it on servers) I have seen enough slip through Red Hat's QA that I don't believe in their approach anymore. Many bugfixes are fairly trivial, and can be verified and patched quickly.

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RHEL 6: already obsolete ?

Posted Apr 22, 2010 12:35 UTC (Thu) by mmahut (guest, #45550) [Link]

Many bugfixes are fairly trivial, and can be verified and patched quickly.

Yes, but also many one-liner (and verified) bug fixes can break customers' high-production environment very badly. At the end of the day, it's about how much is the customer willing to risk for a specific bug fix.

RHEL 6: already obsolete ?

Posted Apr 23, 2010 10:00 UTC (Fri) by dag- (subscriber, #30207) [Link]

Daniel, you cannot expect such a big compilation of software to be without bugs. Certainly not in the first release, but even in subsequent minor releases they are never free of bugs. And if you follow Red Hat's bugzilla you can zoom into all known bugs, and that gives you a very twisted view of reality. (You only see what is wrong, not what is right :-))

But the opposite (like eg. OpenSUSE, Fedora or Ubuntu) will never be more stable, more reliable or less bug-ridden. If you don't even try to freeze your code-base and instead have a rolling distribution, you can only assume software gets better (both more feature-rich and less bugs) but reality is very much different. Mostly because it will never be as well-tested in enterprise environments as a 2-year old RHEL release.

And yes, Red Hat does from time to time release new features or update software as well, and does introduce new drivers, but for a big part they refrain from making too big changes of which the impact cannot be overseen. Mostly in those areas their customers have no interest in, or Red Hat cannot guarantee to support it.

So the question is, does X past bugs or Y existing bugs in RHEL prove that Red Hat's Enterprise strategy is wrong ? Or does it validate to ship the latest and greatest software instead of trying to keep a stable environment for third parties to depend on ? I doubt it and most large companies seem to agree.

Developers and home users disagree, but they have very different needs.