On Mon, 3 Nov 2003, David Berry wrote:
> > 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.
>
> OK, so we wait until a need has been demonstrated for a new OS before
> jumping into supporting it? And we carry on pressing the benefits of
> sites having a common operating system (the managers seemed to realise
> that this was a v. good idea at Preston).
All good sense of course and we should have a recommended flavour of Linux
(which will probably be Fedora for a while) and be part of what is
promoted in the UK, but there are more considerations that just what UK
astronomy sites should use. IRAF supports the following PC versions:
System Distribution Add'l Systems
------ ------------ -------------
FreeBSD 4.2 and higher FBSD
MacOSX 10.1 and higher MACX
RedHat Linux V6.x thru V8.x RHUX Mandrake 7.x and 8.x
Slackware V8.x LNUX Debian 2.x, all others
Solaris 7 for Intel SSOL
SuSE Linux V6.x thru V7.x SUSE
that's the long term competition. People don't want to change OS just to
use our software.
Of course this brings us back to the "./configure;make - empowering users
to build our software themselves", thread, since I doubt IRAF test for all
these platforms either.
One other point. Steve has built the USSC for Debian, with little effort
it seems, that looks good for porting around Linux flavours.
Peter.
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