[WBEL-devel] Package Keys

[Charles Lacour]

On Tuesday 16 December 2003 23:19, donavan nelson wrote:
>  If RHEL 3 goes without support for kernel 2.6 and SATA II until EOL, I'll
> eat this keyboard.

I'm not making any hard and fast predictions, but you might want to give it 
few licks to see what spices would go well with it, just in case.

Probably the biggest single reason Red Hat has beaten out everybody else in 
the business market is that they "get it" when it comes to business.

A few businesses, on the bleeding edge of whatever they do, want and care 
about the latest functionality or performance. The vast majority of 
businesses only want one thing from their software, once they've bought it: 
dependability.

Red Hat historically has put new functionality in new releases. Old releases 
just get bug fixes. From a lot of people's point of view, that's bad. From 
the lion's share of businesses, it's good. It says I can update to the latest 
level of all the packages, and absolutely nothing will break. It might run a 
little faster, and a few bugs are fixed, but every script I wrote depending 
on output being a certain way will still work, because nobody put in a 
"better" version.

Besides, the license says you can use any version of EL that's out. If RHEL 4 
(or 3.1 or 2004 or whatever they name the thing) is out, and it _does_ have 
2.6 and SATA II, they'll probably just tell you to upgrade to it if you want 
those features.

Actually, I HOPE that's the way it will work. I'm an admin for a medium size 
shop (about 60 servers), and my life will get a lot more difficult if running 
"up2date" to fix a security bug is going to change other software (whether it 
be the kernel or anything else) that breaks something. Most of our machines 
are 24x7. A short (1-2 hour), planned outage to replace a disk drive, add 
drives or memory, or do security patches, is considered acceptable. A 3 or 4 
(or 15 or 20, if it REALLY screws things up) UNplanned outage tends to make 
my management very unhappy with me.