[WBEL-users] Wondering about RedHat

[Bastiaan van der Put]

Please buy a Redhat product and complain at them about "the quality control 
has badly degraded".

Else don't complain about something you don't have.

And nobody forced you to upgrade, if you want to be conservative you can 
choose yourself,
wait for others to report problems.

If all people wait before someone else tried it and had the 
problems.....nothing happend.

Bas
At 17:19 9/29/2004, John Hinton wrote:
>I have been running RedHat (non-graphical apache/mail/bind/mysql server 
>setups) since version 5.1 or so. I've done up2date for years and only ever 
>had one issue where suddenly mysql could not be run from an offserver 
>client. All in all, pretty minor considering the number of updates over 
>the years. My whole reason for staying with RedHat was this track record. 
>Yes, I could be more of a tech head and 'research' ever package before 
>installing, but gee, I just don't seem to have the time to do that.
>
>That was then... this is now....
>
>So, we do the updates and suddenly bind is totally broken, I'm getting 
>those makewhatis errors via cron and email... It seems that the quality 
>control has badly degraded. How on earth can you send something out that 
>breaks bind?
>
>So, I'm left wondering if their 'new' business model is creating some 
>'holes'. Perhaps Fedora Core is not in fact really feeding a good product 
>over the the EL section? This is just all interesting to wonder about. 
>What has changed and why are they suddenly now putting out so many bad 
>packages?
>
>I'm really disturbed at this trend. I used to feel pretty darned secure 
>about running up2date at any time... now???? Here I am on what is supposed 
>to be the flagship product, and I now feel as though I need a 'test' 
>server, upon which I can attempt to precisely mirror the packages 
>installed on my more loaded machines, in order to see what's broken this time.
>
>Sorry to be venting here, but gee, what's going to be broken next time? 
>The kernel? PAM? Something that will take my server down and leave me with 
>no method to even get into it? I'm concerned.
>
>I would like everyone to know that I am totally directing this at RedHat 
>and not Whitebox, as Whitebox does appear to be following exactly as they 
>should, right down to the same broken packages.
>
>I'm left wondering though, if perhaps on these quarterly updates, if maybe 
>we should create a 'beta' area, for us to test on, before throwing us into 
>the den of lions, where 'stuff dies'? Maybe consider putting the security 
>updates where they should be and the quarterly updates elsewhere, to 
>protect us from the RedHat blunders. Or maybe even have a repository 
>directory for only the security updates where we could set up2date to look 
>only there and then do mass updating at other times. Maybe this could be 
>done on only one repository or something... I know.... this is a pipe 
>dream, but gee, for now I'd personally like to skip all this broken stuff 
>and feel secure about updates again. Give RedHat time to put out the 
>patched rpms for the broken stuff before updating. This could potentially 
>make Whitebox more conservative, which it already is due to the slight 
>time delay on updates, but even better than its parent.
>
>I'm just happy for this list, where the fixes are generally posted, so if 
>one does run a bit behind on mission critical servers, the fixes are 
>generally posted before I get around to doing my updates.
>
>Just food for thought....
>
>Thanks for Whitebox,
>John Hinton <who is now very happy he's not on a 'beta' EL subscription 
>and is looking at these SUSE DVDs laying here>
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