[WBEL-users] unstable branch as in Debian

[Terrence Martin]

Dan Geist wrote:

>Yes, Fedora. (and I'm not just being sarcastic).
>
>On Thu, 2004-05-27 at 14:52, Florian Effenberger wrote:
>  
>
>>Hi Kirby,
>>
>>    
>>
>>>WBEL, is just a source rebuild of RHEL without the IP bits that
>>>RedHat says you can't reuse.
>>>      
>>>
>>Are there any "official" Red Hat testing/unstable packages?
>>
>>Thanks
>>Florian
>>_______________________________________________
>>Whitebox-users mailing list
>>Whitebox-users@beau.org
>>http://beau.org/mailman/listinfo/whitebox-users
>>    
>>
Go here

http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/

Dag has packages for all of the major redhat distros and you can point 
yum (included in whitebox) at his site.

He has a a wide selection of packages not found on RHEL3 or any other 
redhat for that matter.

Dan is right though, fedora is, despite some claims by redhat to the 
contrary Fedora is the unstable version of RHEL, although more like 
RHEL4. You can take Fedora core packages and use them on RHEL3, but I 
would grab the soruce RPM and rebuild it at the very least. Better yet 
go to Dag's site first.

You have to realize what RHEL3 is. RHEL3, and RHEL2.1 (AS2.1) are 
attempts by RedHat to meet the expectations of a corporate customer. 
Very long predictable release cycles (in Linux or OpenSource terms), 
long term support (5 years from release IIRC) and all of the associated 
corporate style support contracts that your IT managers have grown up with.

RHEL3 is targeted at the suits for who the word unstable makes them wake 
up in a cold sweat.

The fact that some of us cargo shorts wearing types like some of those 
aspects(long term security patches) has resulted in the release of 
"rebuilds" like WBEL or Rocks Cluster Distribution (for my clusters). 
Both of these are RHEL3 based rebuilds with some additional packages and 
all redhat references removed. Some packages are added of course. For 
WBEL it is things like yum, and for Rocks, a whole lot of cluster 
specific stuff (MPI, Batch Queuing Systems, Cluster Management and 
monitoring etc...)

To RedHats credit they have continued their commitment to OpenSource and 
all of the packages on RHEL are Open Source. The only requirement is 
that all mention that the product is RedHat be removed. This is a fair 
requirement and not at all suprising since RedHat by and large is their 
brand and they are required to guard that trademark closely or loose it.

Terrence

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