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What makes us Red Hat

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Re: What makes us Red Hat

#151

Post by vetinari »

greenhouse_gas wrote: post #74
infodroid wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UNIX vendors didn't normally ship releases or updates that introduced dependency issues. Part of their job was doing testing and quality assurance, that's what you were paying good money for. Most such issues were introduced locally. A good sysadmin would know how to avoid dependency hell. For example this might include taking basic precautions such as testing changes in a chroot or development/testing environment, b…

The problem with dependency hell was more that RedHat back then didn't have such a thing as a "rolling release" or "testing" in Debian speak. So while "RedHat 6" worked fine, trying to upgrade (say) OpenOffice would require that you download the rpm from OO's website, which would require that you upgrade Gnome, which would require that you upgrade X, which would require that you upgrade glibc, and down the rathole. C…

As someone who used Redhat since 5.0 - the RPM database never died for me. But then, I've never used 'rpm --force', which many did and I suspect was the major factor in RPM database death.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#152

Post by lima »

systems wrote: post #76
rayvd wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Enterprise world, we typically don't want latest and greatest. We want stability for a long time. :)

I think this is a myth, or at best relative, not all enterprises accept old for stability Many enterprises want up to date and stable software, and since you are paying for stability, why shouldn't you get fairly recent and stable software Most companies for example don't consider MS SQL 2016 as less stable than MS SQL 2008 or 2012, most users expect the same level of stability from the latest SQL Server than from ea…

Better than ever.

With things like Software Collections and IUS you get to run the latest stuff on a rock-solid base. I don't want to upgrade my kernel to get a newer Python or NodeJS release!

https://www.softwarecollections.org/

https://ius.io/

https://github.com/iuscommunity-pkg

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#153

Post by lima »

jjirsa wrote: post #87
systems wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a myth, or at best relative, not all enterprises accept old for stability Many enterprises want up to date and stable software, and since you are paying for stability, why shouldn't you get fairly recent and stable software Most companies for example don't consider MS SQL 2016 as less stable than MS SQL 2008 or 2012, most users expect the same level of stability from the latest SQL Server than from ea…

Nobody running a thousand of anything uses the first release of $X, whether $X is a database or window manager or kernel or router firmware SQL Server 2016 may be better than SQL Server 2008, but enterprises aren't deploying it until it has baked a few months, and maybe sp1/sp2/some major rollup ships for all the bugs the suckers find at rollout

Exactly this.

We've hit more than one kernel regression in staging.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#154

Post by xorblurb »

I thought what makes them RH was their support contract asking for money for (unsupported) CentOS installs, forbidding to republishing kernel patch series if you want to continue to be supported, and the like.

But I've read that text, and have been utterly converted to RH. RH is the ultimate good, go with them, and accept their demands.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#155

Post by lima »

merb wrote: post #127
rsync wrote: post #85

Where is the redhat ecosystem trending with regard to CoW filesystems ? Are people regularly using ZFS-on-linux with redhat ? Or is there an officially sanctioned CoW choice from redhat ? Or is that not on the radar at all right now ?

Well RedHat defaults to XFS which has experimental support for CoW. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... Came in 4.9 and 4.8 (the commit provides the building block). And I also think Dave Chinner (works at RH) put a lot of effort into it? (but I'm not 100% sure)

XFS is one of the most robust filesystems, too.

The xfstests testing suite is basically the standard for filesystem testing, even for non-XFS filesystems.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#156

Post by bonzini »

nvarsj wrote: post #48
jajern wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, support and peace of mind. Packages that make it into their repository are fully tested and supported by RH. Almost all of them are old but they are pretty much guaranteed stable and Red Hat will support the software until the EOL of whichever RH version you are running, even if the developers of the package do not support a version of the package anymore.

Sometimes being old is a double edged sword. For instance, RHEL7 has a lot of problems on AWS because the kernel is too old to properly support many of the virtualisation features AWS provides. On bare metal RHEL7 is great, though.

There are people working specifically on RHEL7 on AWS (and I am in the virtualization team, albeit working on the KVM side).

What features are you interested in?

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#157

Post by lima »

chousuke wrote: post #88
kbenson wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how on earth someone choose rpm over first class Superior Debian package system So, what makes the Debian package system superior? Having built multiple specs in the past, but not any debs, I'm curious. Given that you can often convert debs to RPMs and vice-versa, and can use the different package managers on either type of repository, it's not obvious where one has any specific benefit.

I've built both Debian packages and RPMs, and I feel that RPMs are somewhat easier to wrap your head around. It's been a while since I did Debian package building, though. It's also undeniably true that there was a time when APT + dpkg blew Red Hat's "equivalent" tools out of the water, but that's not the case anymore. One thing I like in particular about dnf/rpm is that I can install packages by using functions, so…

And SPEC files are much easier to work with than Debian's folder full of different files.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#158

Post by legulere »

I really like the products not projects mantra. It kind of explains both the problems that open source projects have, but also the failure of so many Google projects.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#159

Post by bonzini »

rsync wrote: post #85

Where is the redhat ecosystem trending with regard to CoW filesystems ? Are people regularly using ZFS-on-linux with redhat ? Or is there an officially sanctioned CoW choice from redhat ? Or is that not on the radar at all right now ?

For RHEL7, XFS is the recommended filesystem. It has a lot of backports so don't be fooled by the 3.10 kernel version---but not CoW.

Btrfs is not mature enough. ZFS-on-linux is not supported and I've never seen a customer using it.

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