LWN: Comments on "Fast distributions and slow servers"

Fast distributions and slow servers

jspaleta — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 16:54:43 +0000

If Canonical were actually building a successful self-supporting business around their cadence based distribution model..then that would be an indicator that the choice to tie their enterprise/business releases into their consumer desktop release cycle has been successful choice. But that is not the case. There are trade-offs in both approaches, but ultimately a business venture has to find a way to be self-sustaining to be considered a successful business.

-jef

Fast distributions and slow servers

bronson — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 20:20:18 +0000

If everyone must eat their own dogfood, only people who make dogfood will eat.

Fast distributions and slow servers

giraffedata — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 19:34:40 +0000

Yes, I hate it when people eat their dogfood. Dogfood is for dogs. People don't function as well on a diet of dogfood. Furthermore, that motivates people to change the dogfood to make it more palatable to them, at the expense of dogs.

Fast distributions and slow servers

rvfh — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 08:51:52 +0000

Also depends on whether they rent the hardware or the installed server. I.e. bare computer vs computer running Ubuntu on top of which they can install whatever. They may actually not have a choice with their current provider.

Fast distributions and slow servers

NRArnot — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 13:41:00 +0000

I don't even understand why there's anything to discuss.

It's obvious that for a low-maintenance server, you want a distribution that provides security bugfixes for as long as possible, so you have to do a major manual upgrade as infrequently as possible. Fedora does not provide such a stream of fixes. So Fedora is not the right tool for this job.

RHEL would be the obvious choice, if Red Hat gave the Fedora project free licenses, and if the sysadmin were most familiar with Fedora or RHEL. Centos is almost the same, with no licenses needed.

But if the person doing the sysadmin (especially on a volunteer basis?) is most familiar with Ubuntu, then that makes Ubuntu the obvious choice in that location. Force a volunteer off his area of expertise, and at best he makes more mistakes, and/or accomplishes less in his limited amount of time. At worst, he stops volunteering!

Fast distributions and slow servers

mjthayer — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 11:39:46 +0000

Using RHEL rather than Ubuntu would be close to "eating their own". I'm surprised that Redhat doesn't encourage this (maybe even donating a licence or whatever is needed) for this sort of special case.

Fast distributions and slow servers

mmcgrath — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 03:51:16 +0000

> Why does Red Hat not choose one release of Fedora and release that as a
version of RHEL?(after all the rigorous testing)

They basically do this. Which is also why we in Fedora Infrastructure don't really see a major benefit to running an OS just because the word "Fedora" is in /etc/redhat-release. It all started in Fedora and fed into RHEL. It's a slightly liberal view of dogfood but not so crazy.

Fast distributions and slow servers

pr1268 — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 03:23:51 +0000

> Why does Red Hat not choose one release of Fedora and release that as a version of RHEL?(after all the rigorous testing)

Actually, they do. IIRC RHEL4 was rebranded FC3 (someone correct me if I'm wrong).

Fast distributions and slow servers

pranith — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 02:56:55 +0000

This seems to support the argument Ubuntu has that both
the community distro and the official distro being same has some advantages.

Why does Red Hat not choose one release of Fedora and release that as a
version of RHEL?(after all the rigorous testing)

This would atleast give the option for Fedora to be hosted on RHEL if it
wants to eat its own dogfood