Dave
The real question is what could we do if the sites fragment in their use of
OSes. Saying that we could not support sites is probably not an option. ON
the other hand if we see difficulties with excessive fragmentation then we
should point them out to sites.
Clearly we would need to look at what systems are actually in use when the
dust settles before we change things.
The minimum could indeed be a multi-boot machine at RAL on which we test
that the system builds before a release - this has obvious limitations but
maybe we have to live with them.
At the moment we are just kicking around ideas to see where the show
stoppers are.
...David
-----Original Message-----
From: David Berry [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 03 November 2003 12:42
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The future of RedHat
Is now really a good time to be investing major effort in an explosion of
operating systems (having just left our many existing alpha users in the
lurch)? Ok, we may need to decide on a replacement for RH - but does that
mean that we need to take on board loads of other OSs which are
potentially only used by a handful of people? Would we not be wiser to
focus on extending the functionality of our software instead (i.e.
coding). Do we have any real *proof* that these other linuxes are used by
sufficient number of astronomical institutions to make it worth the
effort?
In an ideal world with secure and extensive funding it would of course be
nice to support *everyone's* personal OS preference, but we are not in an
ideal world...
David
> I think that it would be a good idea for each contract programmer to work
> with and administer a different brand of Linux. We would have a brand of
> Linux here at RAL, plus a Solaris 9 box.
>
> What do you all think? I suggest each of you select one of the following,
>
> RHEL
> Fedora
> Mandrake (my preference, been running it at home for years)
> SuSE
> Debian
>
> One of these should be our main supported system at RAL (RHEL or Fedora).
|