Why would one need Software Collections? [LWN.net]

Why would one need Software Collections?

Posted Dec 27, 2012 1:12 UTC (Thu) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: Why would one need Software Collections? by cry_regarder
Parent article: Fedora ponders Software Collections

When providing compute infrastructure to various users, such as at a research university or lab, quite frequently a researcher needs to keep an identical configuration throughout the lifetime of a particular project.

Sure, but if you need a stable platform for your project, Fedora was probably the wrong choice to begin with. Fedora is not trying to be all things to all users; it's trying very much to be a distribution that provides the latest and greatest software to users who want to use the latest and greatest. Users who need more stability than Fedora provides should choose a distribution that concentrates on just that; RHEL would be a good choice for people who are otherwise happy with the general structure of Fedora.

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Why would one need Software Collections?

Posted Dec 27, 2012 16:46 UTC (Thu) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (4 responses)

RHEL (and Fedora) have the problem that they don't provide enough packaged software for long term sustained software development use UNLESS you use repoforge/RPMForge/EPEL in addition.

My recommendation for people who want to develop within an established Linux distribution framework is always to consider Debian first - because everything is available.

This won't help you with Ruby/Python or Node.js development, however, since these languages are all barking mad and use their own packaging systems at insane paces of change, thus creating problems for every Linux distribution

Why would one need Software Collections?

Posted Dec 27, 2012 18:05 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

What you are referring to applies to RHEL since what it includes is only what Red Hat can support commercially. Debian is not a commercial distribution and the same constraints don't exist there. Similarly for Fedora, you don't need external repos for development typically. It includes everything volunteers are interested in maintaining. None of repos you mentioned are even compatible with Fedora.

Why would one need Software Collections?

Posted Dec 28, 2012 12:53 UTC (Fri) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] (2 responses)

FWIW, I went the opposite route. After installing Debian at work, I started bashing my head against the wall because of all the unavailable Perl modules (stuff like psgi and starman) or outdated (the Perl core itself, JSON::RPC stuck on the 0.9x branch, ...).

Switching to Fedora made all these problems go away.

Why would one need Software Collections?

Posted Dec 28, 2012 13:22 UTC (Fri) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link] (1 responses)

cpan2deb is your friend in Debian.

Why would one need Software Collections?

Posted Dec 28, 2012 22:49 UTC (Fri) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link]

If you have the time to maintain the missing modules yourself, cpan2deb is indeed a solution.