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CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

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Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#71

Post by Shish2k »

ams6110 wrote: post #60
ciupicri wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with RPM?

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 things being inconsistent and wouldn't roll back or forwards - "transaction" my arse). Ended up fiddling with "rpm --no-deps" to fix individual packages after drawing out the dependency graph by hand :(

I've had problems with individual .deb packages before, but never broke the whole package management system quite like that before :P

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#72

Post by dorfsmay »

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 believe RedHat would get a lot more followers, and a lot more support money if they did two things:

- have support contracts that make sense, and trust their customers. Let their customers choose which server they want to put under contract etc...

- have more software in their default repo (like, I don't know... Ubuntu)

They managed to corner the market for pay-for software (to a certain extent, Suse has managed to capture a piece of that market), but they make support and lack of standard software so bad, that people go to extreme length tu run on CentOS and ScientifiLinux, and have a single server running Ubuntu.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#73

Post by YokoZar »

gsnedders wrote: post #63
cookiecaper wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Note that having patches from upstream doesn't stop Mozilla from being willing to license the "Firefox" trademark — they will still license it provided they are happy with all the patches. The bigger issue in the Debian case is that while they could distribute a modified version as "Firefox" (under license), some downstream couldn't then take that, modify it, and still call it "Firefox".

Ubuntu, meanwhile, was willing to accept this tradeoff and distribute blessed Firefox, as Ubuntu also has trademarks that downstream modifiers (like Mint) need to remove.

It would be nice if it was easy to remove said trademarks by something as simple as uninstalling a package, however unfortunately most marks are spread throughout the archive.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#74

Post by SwellJoe »

mergy wrote: post #18

Now if they can just get rid of RPM I might come back!

Just to provide a similarly brief and pointless argument: I strongly prefer yum/RPM to apt-get/deb, both as a package maintainer (for tens of thousands of users) and as a system maintainer with dozens of servers to maintain.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#75

Post by YokoZar »

matt__rose wrote: post #64
undoware wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what the OP 'mergy' intended, but I'd guess that the intended reason had to do with better ecosystem curation. Under the hood, my understanding is that .rpm is marginally inferior to .dpkg, but not remarkably so. E.g. using cpio instead of gz as the format basis. So by elimination, the only reason to prefer .rpm would be the rpms, if you follow. As a longtime Fedora user and a recent emigre (post-Snowden…

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.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#76

Post by Theodores »

ams6110 wrote: post #57
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

I find it really odd that some FOSS people regard Red Hat as some sort of evil corporation Indeed, the success of Linux in the enterprise owes a lot to Red Hat, as they gave enterprises the sort of consistent, corporate-buzzword-compliant support agreements that removed a lot of the scariness that would otherwise impede use of Linux for "important" services.

This was true in 1998. Cowardly companies that insisted on being able to pay support for anything they deployed were able to hand over $$$ to RedHat then tick the box of 'support'. However, as we all know, you get a Linux user/expert to fix the server, you don't call RedHat.

Due to the success of Ubuntu you have user/experts in small to medium sized companies that have 'given Linux a go' and got some good experience of Ubuntu. They might prefer the Ubuntu ways of doing things, e.g. the 'no root' security model, the modern, up to date packages (e.g. latest version of PHP), the ultra easy firewall and plenty else.

However, due to the perception that Red Hat is 'enterprise' and that small to medium companies re cheapskate, the CentOS rip-off gets specified by micro-managers because they have heard it is more 'enterprisey'. 'They know best' and go with the turgid CentOS regardless of whether any developers on the team would prefer something else.

You then have a lot of hosting companies pushing CentOS because they think it is more 'enterprisey' and what their customers want. Non-technical managers listen to them and then blame their team for any server problems.

Sure, if you know your way around Red Hat it is the greatest thing since Windows 3.0, you can get it to do what you want just fine. But, actually, if you are not an expert yet then very little about Red Hat is obvious. Far too many answers to common problems are guesswork in forum answers that you come across. Furthermore any serious claim to better security goes out the window as soon as you add random repositories that you might need just to get your work done.

Red Hat has had its day. CentOS has been a mere rip off of Red Hat and it has not added to the state of the art. I know it has its fans but I wish it would just go away.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#77

Post by sciurus »

lvillani wrote: post #7

I really wish that, when RHEL/CentOS branches from Fedora to make a new release, they would also keep and provide a snapshot of Fedora's repository at that time, just like what Ubuntu does when they sync with Debian Sid (i.e.: packages in 'main' and 'restricted' repos are supported, all other packages in the Debian archive are imported and made available in 'universe' and 'multiverse' repository for your convenience)…

Then who provides security and bug fixes for that snapshot for the ten years during which a RHEL version is supported? EPEL is basically what you're asking for, but limited to packages where someone is willing to make that commitment.

"RHEL 6 was first released in 2010 and there's still Python 2.6 on that"

Or Python 2.7 or 3.3 can be installed via Software Collections. These have a predictable release cycle- a new version is released every 18 months, and each version is supported for three years.

https://access.redhat.com/site/support/policy/updates/errata...

https://access.redhat.com/site/support/policy/updates/rhscl/

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#78

Post by sciurus »

geekowl wrote: post #36
koenigdavidmj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me what CentOS will no longer be able to do that they could previously.

The idea is to have a distro with no "corporate" oversight -- an independent distro. This is the reasons why I heavily lean Debian and OpenBSD, because they are independent.

Since CentOS blindly reproduced a product generated by a corporation, I'm having a hard time understanding your argument.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#79

Post by Terretta »

justinmk wrote: post #58
veidr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it really odd that some FOSS people regard Red Hat as some sort of evil Why do you find it odd when it is succinctly explained in the comment to which you are replying?

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.

An attempt to "explain" why is in GP's 3rd link:

http://www.pnaelv.net

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#80

Post by akbar501 »

Congrats to the CentOS team. You filled a much needed gap when the Fedora / RHEL split happened.

As someone who used Red Hat Linux in the 90's / early 2000's, you had to be there to know how large of a gap the CentOS team filled.

Historical background:

Red Hat Linux (RHL) was the most widely used Linux distro in the late 90's / early 2000's. Overnight, RedHat destabilized RHL by turning it into Fedora with it's rapid release cycles, lack of back ports, bleeding edge packages etc. RHEL became a closed distro with only source distributed, but none of the tools to easily replicate the build.

RHL users (who were the majority of Linux users) were faced with a choice. Pay for RHEL or switch distros. This really sucked b/c RHL deployments were largely servers that were designed for long term deployments. The community was faced with a large scale migration of servers which involved a large population of web and edge of network deployments.

This is when CentOS stepped in, created a binary compatible build of RHEL, and allowed long time RHL users to continue with a RedHat-like distro.

RedHat has been a major contributor to OSS. However, projects like CentOS have filled very important roles in the Linux and OSS communities. Again, congrats to the team.

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