OT Fedora in production (as nstallation Problem on Fedora Core8)

[Rob Sterenborg]

Lol. So now we have an "OS war" between RHEL en Fedora? :-)

>> Centos is basically Red Hat Enterprise, the stable, standardised
>> fully tested production qaulity commercial grade and supported OS
>> from Red Hat.
> 
> I don't think RedHat support CentOS... ;)

No they don't. But AFAIK RHEL is meant to be stable, CentOS is rebuilt
from the RHEL sources and was meant to be binary compatible with RHEL.

> I can only find articles where Fedora people recommend Fedora for
> production use,

I'm sorry, but I'm a bit sceptic about that sort of articles.
IMO: of course they recommend Fedora.

> e.g. from Fedora Project Leader, Max Spevack
> (http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/17/177220)
> in August last year:

When being supportive for his own creation, he can't say it's unstable,
now can he?
(Okay, unstable is "a bit" strong because Fedora is not really totally
unstable. I guess you get my point.)

> "Anyone (Red Hat or non-Red Hat) who tells you that Fedora
> isn't suitable for a production server is wrong. If someone tells
> you that Fedora is "just a beta for RHEL", they too are wrong.
> 
> Either the person is insufficiently informed about what Fedora is
> (and it's our job within Fedora to do that), or the person is
> purposefully misrepresenting Fedora and neglecting to tell the
> whole story, in which case it's our job within Fedora to call them
> out.

No matter what they say, Fedora is still the playground for RHEL. What I
have always understood is that software or features that appear in
Fedora *may* appear in RHEL because it proved to behave well (and would
be useful? oh well..), not vice versa.
So, no-one can tell me that Fedora is as stable as RHEL.

> Anyway, I've been very happy using Fedora on my servers for years,
> and will continue to do so. Others may decide to avoid it for
> things like CentOS,

I'm not going to tell you not to use Fedora. If you feel comfortable
with it, use it.
However, I've had problems with Fedora (I'll admit: I tried to build a
multimedia system several time but I keep having all kinds of problems
in that area). So, when I need a stable and reasonably well supported
Linux but for some reason cannot offer a distro that has paid support
(RHEL) then I'll offer CentOS, not Fedora.

> but I prefer to keep more up-to-date with the more recent
> stable releases of things!

I agree with Peter: more recent is not always more stable. Of course,
sometimes you need "more recent" because of features, critical bugfixes,
etc, not (yet) available via RPM.

If I want or need specific/latest features/bugfixes/whatever not in any
suitable RPM, I'll build from source and keep the configure line (and
any other info if needed) for reference. That way I can easily compile a
new version of the software in the future and that makes, normally,
upgrading still easy. (I'm not making RPM's myself as I don't have the
need for it: it would just be an extra step that I can omit.)


Grts,
Rob