Hi Ricardo,
I agree with you completely. One of the problems we were having was that
people were choosing RedHat or Redhat for the same thing ... and also that
RHEL, SL, SLC, and CentOS are essentially the same thing. You should not
care at all as an experiment person about the difference between
RHEL,SL,SLC,CentOS. However given the large differences between e.g. a RH
{6,7,9} system and RHEL, you do want to be able to distinguish between
them.
The idea is to make "name" the thing you really care about. I chose to go
with Rod Walker's suggestion -- ELC for Enterprise Linux Compatible.
Let's face it: if we can't get a program to run the same on
RHEL,SL,SLC,and CentOS, we are really screwed because these are supposed
to be the same OS just recompiled by different people. [ Note I said
"supposed" ... one could guess that if we can't get programs to run on all
four, then someone broke the supposition ]. I had suggested "RHC" for
RedHat Classic, meaning 6.2 / 7.3 / 9.0 etc.
Some people may really care, for whatever reason, who packaged this
distribution, so I suggested "Version" as the thing that distinguishes.
So we'd have ELC for all four of the enterprise guys, but the Version
would be RedHat / Scientific / ScientificCERN / CentOS [ note I am just
guessing about the Fermi one. ]
"Release" then names the specific version.
One would hope that this would be enough, and if we can standardize on at
least the Name and Release, the Version should be almost irrelevant except
for debugging purposes (ie my job fails on all sites reporting
ScientificCERN 3.0.3 ...)
> I find it great if we can agree on a reduced number of these
> tags, but the work is not final until their "meaning" clearly
> established and sites adhere to it.
>
> Of course the immediate question is who defines these
> references?
This is indeed the question. Stephen Burke has been reminding us of the
problem for months, and so has Willem van Leeuwen (our local D0 guy). The
only proposal I've really seen is "let's call all RedHat systems SLC, or
better yet let's just all install SLC and then the OS stuff is
irrelevant". I think this is a really poor proposal, and put forward my
own and even implemented it. I hope others will join; otherwise the
damage is not so great (yet) since we still don't have an acceptable
standard, so anything goes.
I sincerely a) hope this helps and b) think it's the right principle. I'm
not attached to the name, as long as whatever proposal wins is not
specific to one specific flavor. Meaning I don't think "Name" should be
any of SL / SLC / CentOS. RHEL is somewhat more acceptable since it is
the parent distribution from which the others is derived, but I'd even
prefer to leave out the RH because RH did not directly provide the others.
ELC / CEL / GEL / etc would all be OK with me.
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