Calling for a new openSUSE development model

Posted Jun 17, 2012 0:11 UTC (Sun) by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
In reply to: Calling for a new openSUSE development model by Cyberax
Parent article: Calling for a new openSUSE development model

It depends on what you mean by "enterprise."

If you mean web companies and software companies, then yes, there is quite a bit of Ubuntu. Very occasionally you'll see Debian or even something like Gentoo. Non-technology companies tend to stick to Red Hat 5 or 6, at least here in the U.S.

It's easy to forget when you work in software, but software is not a very large part of the overall economy. Sectors like oil, bulk chemicals, healthcare, and so on completely dwarf software and those guys have computers too.

So if you love monocultures, come over and work on enterprise software! You'll also get the fun of dealing with 5-year old system software and its bugs. RHEL 5 is very much alive in the enterprise space.

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Calling for a new openSUSE development model

Posted Jun 17, 2012 8:46 UTC (Sun) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (8 responses)

Can confirm.
Over the last 3 years I've seen an increasing enterprise consolidation around Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. RHEL 6 is now gaining but still a minority. Of course the real majority is CentOS but I consider it a variant of same.

Ubuntu, SuSE, Debian are all far and away second fiddle. SuSE has lost ground, I'd say, while Ubuntu has held steadish, so that they're both now at a very rare-to-hear-about-them point.

Personally I'm happy SuSE is waning because of the crazy shenanigans they've pulled several times now in libc symbol binding games. SuSE is starting to feel like a place where you should only run software compiled by SuSE or yourself. Third party binaries are a minefield.

Calling for a new openSUSE development model

Posted Jun 17, 2012 9:53 UTC (Sun) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link] (7 responses)

>the crazy shenanigans they've pulled several times now in libc symbol binding games.

Can you actually subtantiate that claim on a /technical/ basis or is this just the typical "I hate X, gonna move to Y"-type rant from a spoiled user?

Calling for a new openSUSE development model

Posted Jun 18, 2012 3:51 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (6 responses)

Your level of hostility is off the charts.

Suse 10.1 through 10.4 specifically bound the resolver library tightly by modifying the symbol table with the system allocator to work around firefox bugs. This meant that any executable using an alternate allocator on these versions would end up trying to free memory with the custom allocator which wasn't allocated with it. A crash at this point was about the best outcome you could hope for.

The bug is documented and filed.

There are others I remember less well.

Take your baseless presumptions and go home.

Calling for a new openSUSE development model

Posted Jun 18, 2012 3:53 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Basically this is "you're a liar unless you do all my homework for me." And I consider it trolling.

Calling for a new openSUSE development model

Posted Jun 18, 2012 9:42 UTC (Mon) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link] (3 responses)

>Suse 10.1 through 10.4

My point is that blaming something today for issues it has had in the past is unjustified. (Just like certain political developments in the real world.)

Calling for a new openSUSE development model

Posted Jun 18, 2012 9:52 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm not done debugging the current problem that only shows up on SLES and no other linux distribution that is resulting in memory corruption completely at random.

Calling for a new openSUSE development model

Posted Jun 18, 2012 9:53 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Meanwhile, we do have customers who run those versions, so it's not exactly the past.

Calling for a new openSUSE development model

Posted Jun 18, 2012 15:55 UTC (Mon) by nevyn (guest, #33129) [Link]

> My point is that blaming something today for issues it has had in
> the past is unjustified.

So much sarcasm ... so little time. I shall save my energy and just highlight your words.

Calling for a new openSUSE development model

Posted Jul 8, 2012 1:21 UTC (Sun) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]

I actually like using SuSE on my personal desktop, so I'm sad to hear about these 10.x problems. Do you have a bug number? My Google skills are weak today, apparently. The number of people using SuSE may be small, but it's not zero (for us), and I hope I don't end up having to debug something like this in the future.