[WBEL-devel] Choosing a RHEL rebuild project

[Hedemark, Magnus]

Henk van Lingen [mailto:henkvl@cs.uu.nl] wrote:

>   It seems, there are 3 options: Whitebox, Tao and CentOs. The
>   last, I'm not enthusiastic about. There is still no 
> released version 
>   and, more important, the project seems to build all kind of 
> distribitions,
>   build sets and whatever trying to be a debian-like 
> community (I'm not
>   that kind of free/gpl etc. zealot, more a BSD-license type (no flame
>   intended) :-)).

I think there are some misconceptions that need to be cleared up.

CentOS does have a number of builds out there.  Build 4 is the current
build.  Regardless of whether you call it a stable release or a beta or
whatever, the fact of the matter is it was at least as "stable" as the
"stable" release of WBEL.  I have had both running side by side on a number
of production desktop systems at $WORK and they are both rough around the
edges to pretty much the same extent.  CentOS has just been more cautious
about labeling their 1.0 release until the rough edges have been smoothed.

cAos is an umbrella, soon a legal umbrella, for a number of different
projects.  There is a cAos distribution maintained by one group of people.
There is a CentOS distribution maintained by another group of people.  There
is of course some collaboration between the two groups.  In the end, what
you must realize is that CentOS is maintained by a focused community of
people.  WBEL is maintained by a focused person.

I follow both projects, but at $WORK I have decided to standardize on
CentOS.  Our vendors are falling into line one by one offering support of
their products on CentOS.  I have it running on one production server now,
and will have it running on all Linux systems by the end of the quarter.

The community is a great benefit;  if one of the core people gets hit by a
bus, the project will continue.  If John gets hit by a bus, WBEL as we know
it is dead.  What it really comes down to with WBEL is that you're
standardizing on a distribution that is run as a vanity project by one
person who is funded only by a county library.

>   Maybe I don't understand the cAos community,

I would tend to agree with you.

>  but anyways, 
> I'm looking
>   for a project that tries to be very close to Red Hat 
> Enterprise Linux 3
>   and I like using 'yum' with it. So there's TaoLinux and 
> Whitebox. 

I'm using yum with CentOS and it works great.  And it is at least as close
to RHEL as WBEL is.  I don't understand what you're implying here.

> Here
>   there seems to be some doubts about the project continuity etc. But
>   according to the archives, it is used a lot and I see some familiar
>   names. The TaoLinux archives are very quiet.

Mailing list archives are a bad way to judge a community.  cAos/CentOS has a
thriving community, but not much goes on in email.  Most of the time you'll
find people in #caos on irc.freenode.net.

I think WBEL has its place.  While all of the projects are definitely bad at
sharing technical details of how to clone RHEL, John deserves credit for
providing more doc on this than anyone else to date.  I think that it can
also have a place on your home computer.   I don't think it would be a
responsible business decision to use it at work, though, without fully
considering the inherent threats to the continuity of the project under its
current closed model.