John Summerfield said...

|> That's fine until you start using a different version of
|> a package than the vendor uses.  Maybe there's a way around
|> that in yum; I haven't really figured yum out yet.  Is there
|> a *good* doc on yum out there that explains such things?
|> 
|
|Where are the equivalent documents for SL{3,4}?

SL Docs Howtos: https://www.scientificlinux.org/documentation/howto/create.site

|I'm not sure I understand the question, and "site" is awfully vague.

Sites are a feature of the SL distribution.  Someone there
noted they're the same for SL5.

|_I_ don't like adding different versions of packages than the vendor 
|provides as it instantly increases the maintenance burden; RH does a 
|fairly good job of maintaining the packages it offers, and the cloners 
|such as SL mostly do a good job of tracking that maintenance and of 
|maintaining their own additions.

I don't, either, but we don't always have a choice.
Since we chose to go with SL instead of RH, getting
RH to change something isn't an option.  If they
don't upgrade (and they don't unless they have to
since one of the main reasons for EL is stability)
then SL isn't likely to, either.

|As soon as one uses a different version of a package, to a greater or 
|lesser extent that support is negated.

Given my previous paragraph, it should be obvious that
the term "support" has no bearing here.

Sometimes we need a newer package than the one delivered
by TUV.  This can be driven by 3rd party software,  our
developers, obscure bugs, customer requirements, all sorts
of things.  Especially since we tend to switch to a new OS
distribution only once every 2-3 years.  For instance we
had a real need for OpenOffice 2 while we were still on a
platform that came with OO 1.x.

|Generally, and depending on budgetary and support requirements, I would 
|choose amongst RHEL, a RHEL clone and Fedora, or the equivalent other 
|distros.
|
|Where I require a wide range of prepackaged software, I tend to use 
|Debian (but it's a long time since that happened on my desktop, and with 
|the advent of support for virtualisation that has become less likely).

We have no choice.  Our tool vendors all support EL.  We don't
want to pay for hundreds of EL licenses so we use a rebuild.
So far the tool vendors have accepted that, so long as we're
on a rev they support.

Thanks,
Miles