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CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

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Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#101

Post by Confusion »

redhatstory wrote: post #23

In the beginning, there was Red Hat Linux[1]. It was sold in boxes at stores such as CompUSA (remember?) but was also available for free download from Red Hat. Then, Red Hat decided they could make more money by spinning off Red Hat Linux into a separate enterprise-only product called Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which they declined to make available for free in a ready-to-install binary form. Fedora[2] was also…

I think RH recognized that

* CentOS has significant market share

* people sometimes want to switch from CentOS to RH, but not vice versa (natural evolution in growing companies)

Thus they will cooperate with CentOS, with the end result that switching from CentOS to RH will become easier.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#102

Post by cturner »

cookiecaper wrote: post #50
justinmk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat is one of the most prolific single-entity contributors to open source in the history of open source. I find it really odd that some FOSS people regard Red Hat as some sort of evil corporation that should be the target of said FOSS people's flung shit. By the way, what did Firefox do to live down its IceWeasel[1] infamy? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat

The Firefox trademark dispute is not the same thing. Red Hat was attempting to keep their product from the open-source homebrew market -- they wanted to charge money for their software, and did this as far as the license would allow. Red Hat was as hostile as legally permissible to anyone trying to circumvent this, like CentOS. Mozilla simply claimed that the Firefox trademark cannot be applied to any codebase that M…

    Because Debian issues a version of Firefox that contains
    unofficial patches, they cannot legally call their
    distribution "Firefox", since Mozilla hasn't officially
    blessed that exact codebase.
There's a lot of sense to this. Consider the hacked up configurations of vim that ship with redhat and debian. The maintainers code intrusive personal-favourite settings into /etc/vimrc (e.g. settings that reformat your code). People get annoyed by the behaviour and think "vim sucks" whereas the default vim distro is conservative about intrusive behaviour.

Mozilla are happy for distros to put out their code - just not hacked up versions of it with the same name. Good for them.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#103

Post by tene »

YokoZar wrote: post #75
matt__rose wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly it's a matter of picking your poison. dpkg allows some things that RPM doesn't, and vice-versa. dpkg does have some nice features (well, features I can't remember, except for I went "Ooo, I want rpm to have that" when I saw it) One thing that dpkg has that really annoys the hell out of me is allowing for user input during the transaction. It makes unattended upgrades impossible

In general Debian/Ubuntu packages do not prompt the user with debconf questions these days, although there are occasional leftovers in old packages if you upgrade via a terminal with apt-get update. You can define an environment variable, DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive, to force even the worst-behaved packages to never ask a question.

You can set those configurations, certainly, but it's up to the package maintainer to actually respect them. At my previous company, I occasionally ran into packages that insisted on trying to read from the terminal, even when installed noninteractively, with all configuration flags set to noninteractive. I can understand the potential appeal for a lone individual working with a small number of hand-maintained systems, but when working with a large cluster, interaction during package operations is just a horrible misfeature.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#104

Post by pferde »

rattray wrote: post #99
SEJeff wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From someone who's day job it is to manage thousands of Linux servers and has professionally worked with SLES, RHEL, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, and a custom Linux from Scratch internal Linux distribution, you couldn't be farther from reality if you tried. """Due to the success of Ubuntu you have users/experts in small to medium sized companies that have 'given Linux a go' and got some good experience of Ubuntu""". I'm s…

Speaking as someone who has "given Ubuntu a go", but has no expertise whatsoever... can you explain what your list of RHEL/Ubuntu pros & cons mean? I have no idea why one arrangement of /etc/ is preferable to another, for example. Is it just security, isolation, and better package management?

Please read again. Those are not "pros&cons", but mere list of differences between the two distro families.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#105

Post by deno »

Shish2k wrote: post #71
ams6110 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is that they got a bad rep long ago before there were decent package managers. As I recall, you had to install dependencies manually and updating a system could get nightmarish. Nothing really wrong with rpm as a package technology per-se, but before yum it was a lot less friendly.

Just a couple of days ago I was doing an upgrade from 6.4 to 6.5 and yum died in the middle; fixing that was quite hellish as rpm somehow decided that multiple conflicting versions of several packages were installed at once (eg glibc v131 and v137), and it wouldn't do anything until that was fixed (it wouldn't even attempt to fix the problem until it was fixed... "yum-complete-transaction" just complained about thing…

> "transaction" my arse

That’s not something that can be made reliable with either rpm or apt. The only options for reliable upgrades are 1) nix model or 2) filesystem transactions/snapshots. Especially, yum has official plugin for making LVM/Btrfs/ZFS(?) snapshot before committing each transaction. I imagine there’s something similar for Debian/Ubuntu.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#106

Post by brokenparser »

SwellJoe wrote: post #100
mergy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not my experience. I hope it has improved, but the missing dependencies were always a total pain.

Both yum and apt-get have excellent dependency resolution. I don't really know what else to say about it. I can remember the days of "RPM hell" (though I rarely found it all that problematic) as I've been using Linux as my primary server and desktop OS since 1995, but yum was in widespread use by 2005. It's been a long time since missing dependencies was a thing you needed to think about on any modern Linux distribut…

You don't need those virtual machines if you use pbuilder. All builds will run under the same kernel but if it's affected by that you're doing weird things. Also, your package shouldn't depend on any meta package as it's bad style (what if that package drops a dependency you relied on?). A good package lists only the bare minimum dependencies needed to get it to work (but under Debian may recommend and suggest other packages to go along with it).

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#107

Post by rplnt »

dragonwriter wrote: post #61
justinmk wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP doesn't "explain" why RH is evil. Discomfiting legal maneuvers do not cancel their thousands of commits to the Linux kernel, init.d, GWT, Cygwin (!), etc.

> GP doesn't "explain" why RH is evil. It explains why some people in the FOSS community think of them that way. There seems to be a problem here of people not being able to understand that it is possible for people to have a different point of view, and no amount of "explaining" is going to fix that.

There are more reasons. For example http://linux.slashdot.org/story/11/03/04/1550231/red-hat-sto...

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#108

Post by dspillett »

cookiecaper wrote: post #50
justinmk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat is one of the most prolific single-entity contributors to open source in the history of open source. I find it really odd that some FOSS people regard Red Hat as some sort of evil corporation that should be the target of said FOSS people's flung shit. By the way, what did Firefox do to live down its IceWeasel[1] infamy? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat

The Firefox trademark dispute is not the same thing. Red Hat was attempting to keep their product from the open-source homebrew market -- they wanted to charge money for their software, and did this as far as the license would allow. Red Hat was as hostile as legally permissible to anyone trying to circumvent this, like CentOS. Mozilla simply claimed that the Firefox trademark cannot be applied to any codebase that M…

IIRC there was not any animosity between the firefox an dDebian teams though (there was plenty reported by people who saw the matter and misreported it, and Stallman waded in as is his style which didn't help the mis reporting ("RMS ponders whether Firefox is truly free" was reported as "entire open source community vs Firefox, fight at 11" by some)).

They started user the trademark thing to force some distributors who were adding patches they did not want to be associated with (either because they were just plain malicious or because they didn't want thie bug tracker filled with reports about code they had nothing to do with), the Debian people scanned the relevant legal details and decided that they either needed to stop using hte name or work put together an agreement that covered them. The latter would have been easy enough but was against their preferred WayOfThings(tm) as it would mean downstream of them would (legally speaking) need to make changes or separately arrange an agreement, so they chose a new branding instead.

Neither the Firefox team protecting their name or the Debian team stucking to their mission statement is wrong IMO (though of course some may desagree, depending on definitions of "free" and so forth, so they could be said to be wrong), but without the branding change the two are incompatible on a legal point that was only enforce to stop the malicious.

With the branding change the "conflict" is resolved, and no one is really unhappy or otherwise reasonably put out.

The RedHat/CentOS case is a bit different: the way CentOS were using the name in no way implied that RedHat was responsible for CentOS but did accurately represent how CentOS was built, so CentOS were probably on good legal ground but capitulated because they didn't want that particular fight. This, IMO, made RadHat somewhat bully-like in this case - though to be honest it takes more than one iffy commercial/legal wrangle to undo the pile of good that Redhat has (directly and otherwise) done for Linux and related projects over the years (and continues to do).

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#109

Post by SwellJoe »

brokenparser wrote: post #106
SwellJoe wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both yum and apt-get have excellent dependency resolution. I don't really know what else to say about it. I can remember the days of "RPM hell" (though I rarely found it all that problematic) as I've been using Linux as my primary server and desktop OS since 1995, but yum was in widespread use by 2005. It's been a long time since missing dependencies was a thing you needed to think about on any modern Linux distribut…

You don't need those virtual machines if you use pbuilder. All builds will run under the same kernel but if it's affected by that you're doing weird things. Also, your package shouldn't depend on any meta package as it's bad style (what if that package drops a dependency you relied on?). A good package lists only the bare minimum dependencies needed to get it to work (but under Debian may recommend and suggest other…

I read about pbuilder, but couldn't figure out how to make it work. Again, the documentation for the apt-get/deb ecosystem is awful. If I thought I knew how any of it worked, I'd write new docs...but, our Debian/Ubuntu repos are awful (they work fine for end users, but they are awful to maintain...I must be doing it wrong because it's so slow to regenerate and requires so much human involvement, but I don't know how to do it right). And, not only are the docs difficult or non-existent, the tools aren't very discoverable. Once I knew mock existed, I was able to get it up and running mostly by playing with it and looking at examples. I wasn't able to figure that out with pbuilder.

A quick googling just now revealed the Ubuntu wiki has what looks like good documentation for pbuilder, so I may be able to make it work now. It doesn't actually look that difficult (though it seems to require pretty advanced shell scripting for some things that seem like they ought to be in there with a command line switch or a config file option, but my reading of it was cursory and it may just be a weird bit of showing off in the docs, and shell scripting isn't actually a necessary part of the process). But, with truly awful docs, as they existed when I was trying to use it several years ago, I couldn't make it go.

I really don't hate apt-get as much as all of this makes it sound like I do. As a user, apt-get it fine. As a maintainer, I find it extremely frustrating. If the docs were better, I'd probably like it more (though not as much as RPM/yum...the simplicity of maintaining packages for a yum repo is really hard to beat).

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#110

Post by blueskin_ »

justinmk wrote: post #39
redhatstory wrote: post #23

In the beginning, there was Red Hat Linux[1]. It was sold in boxes at stores such as CompUSA (remember?) but was also available for free download from Red Hat. Then, Red Hat decided they could make more money by spinning off Red Hat Linux into a separate enterprise-only product called Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which they declined to make available for free in a ready-to-install binary form. Fedora[2] was also…

Red Hat is one of the most prolific single-entity contributors to open source in the history of open source. I find it really odd that some FOSS people regard Red Hat as some sort of evil corporation that should be the target of said FOSS people's flung shit. By the way, what did Firefox do to live down its IceWeasel[1] infamy? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat

Debian modify Firefox and so can't package it as an official build.
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