On 07/24/2011 04:10 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
> On 07/23/2011 11:35 AM, 夜神　岩男 wrote:
>> tl;dr: No hard data to support your friend's claim. SL6 is lower on the
>> stress & drama scale.

...words words words...

> (MIS: how to use an information system for the mission of an
> organization, typically financial gain; CS: how to develop and build the
> fundamentals upon which information systems can be deployed).

The key to getting the most out of a deployment -- to any end -- is to 
deploy something.

Nothing is 100% and in the case of getting something for nothing (that 
is, using SL, CentOS, or any other unsupported software) you get exactly 
what you pay for: nothing. If you have a budget and require stability 
(at the bureaucratic level this should be read as "someone to blame") 
then Red Hat vendor support is worth a world more than an SL/CentOS 
support vendor -- I know, as I support rpm distros commercially.

There are levels of understanding there is no way to provide the brain 
time for without being Red Hat. Its an issue of Red Hat having the 
bandwidth and organizational infrastructure already in place to tackle 
almost any conceivable situation or problem for a price. There are 
simply things an outside vendor cannot do at a reasonable rate of return 
-- if they could they would either be a producing 
competitor/co-developer (as in IBM) or they would be IBM, not a company 
supporting software they didn't have much to do with building, if not 
writing.

> I was hoping that at least
> for SL, the curtain would be lifted as to how RHEL source is converted
> into a SL production distribution (if this is documented, the relevant
> URLs would be appreciated).

There is not much of a curtain. SL is built the same way RHEL is built, 
which is the same way Fedora is built. Understand the Fedora built 
process and you will suddenly understand the terse/opaque conversations 
on the dev list and the release notes will make a lot more sense to you.

Here is a place to start:

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Koji
https://fedorahosted.org/koji/

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Projects/Mock
https://fedorahosted.org/mock/

Understanding is work, and complex things are not very well understood 
in a hurry. Your expectations for responses on this list may not be 
realistic if they include a quick run-down of the build process, how 
things get developed and the differences between SL and CentOS. There is 
an entire, gigantic effort called Fedora required to exist just to 
tackle this type of understanding, and any one person working on it can 
only hope to deeply understand a small piece of it at a time -- and all 
of this is a moving target, even in RHEL/SL/CentOS land.

And that is why companies like Red Hat with RHEL and IBM with z/OS have 
value to people who need absolute concrete stability. "Good enough" is 
where the inexhaustively tested (but pretty darn good), partially 
supported (sometimes) systems such as SL and CentOS reside.

Them's the breaks. There are no simple answers for you along this line 
of questioning.

-Iwao