[WBEL-devel] Choosing a RHEL rebuild project

[Hedemark, Magnus]

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

>   (hm, caos website seems down right now) What's the reletion between
>   caos and centos, the last seems to be build with tools from 
> the first,
>   iirc. What's the point or the advantage of being 
> 'self-hosted'? I had the
>   impression (probably wrong) that that was mainly 'for the 
> fun of it' or
>   'to be totally free', or whatever.

cAos is a very progressive distribution that is based on RHEL.  Nobody on
the cAos core team owns RHEL, so they had the need to rebuild it.  They had
an internal-use rebuild of RHAS 2.1 just for building cAos-2.  Well several
community members took interest in this, and when the cAos folks starting
talking about cAos-3 being built from RHEL 3, naturally some people who
wanted an RHEL 3 clone for its own sake got very interested.

So some people in the cAos community are only interested in CentOS to have
an RHEL clone.  Others are interested in it as a platform to start the cAos
3 project from.

>   I'm also aiming at production servers, so can you convince 
> me CentOS is
>   the right choice? 

Hey I don't have any vested interest in what you run.  I ran various
distributions side by side, had some willing members of my userbase test and
provide feedback, and also looked into the potential longevity of the
various distributions to make sure we were standardizing on something that
we can depend on being around in a few years.  Your motivations for picking
a distro over another may be different than mine.  Make a list of must-haves
and would-likes for each distro, and please do look past the technical
issues because technically these distros are almost clones of one another
(by way of all being clones of RHEL).