On 29/04/14 06:53, Scott Dowdle wrote:
> Steven Haigh,
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
>> My thoughts are more moving towards using a continually rolling distro like Arch Linux.
>  [...]
>> EL5 & 6 really came around at a time where there was a lot more instability in the linux 
>> environment - and these days, unless you have a strict auditing requirement, there isn't 
>> really much tying anyone to EL.
>>
>> Thoughts?
> 
> Yeah.  My thoughts are that EL and Arch are two completely different things.  People use EL because they want a slow moving, long supported, stable platform.  The only problem with that is that it starts to get long-in-the-tooth after a few years... especially with regards to kernels, development and web stacks, and desktop software... for people who care about those things.
> 
> Obviously Fedora and Arch are very different from RHEL.  I group those two together because they are two of the most bleeding edge distros.  I personally like Fedora for my desktops and EL for servers.
> 
> The thing with using EL is that third-parties target it because it is a known quantity and reproducible.  Each Arch box is basically a snowflake (none of them the same) and because it is a rolling platform, it is a target that is constantly moving... so third-party stuff (for some value of third-party stuff... like Zimbra as one tiny example) will almost never target it because it doesn't know which version of Arch to build for.
> 
> I say that with no disrespect to Arch nor the wonderful job the Arch community does putting together the distro and everything that circles around it... but clearly Arch and RHEL/EL are NOT targeted at the same use cases.  While there might be some overlap, for most users, not so much.
> 
> I also encourage you to use Arch if you want to... and if it works for you... but I don't think there is going to be much  movement of users between Arch and EL and vice versa.
> 
> There is a ton of stuff to get excited about in the upcoming RHEL7 and a lot of people have been chomping at the bit for newer stuff in RHEL and are indeed excited.  No one is going to twist your arm and make you be excited though.

You know, 6 months ago I would have agreed with you. When I took a good
solid look at what I use (across everything!) - the majority of projects
don't care what version of apache / php / library it runs with.

Up to EL6, there was a lot of churn in the PHP space (and a few others)
that required updating from EL5 to EL6 for PHP / apache versions etc -
but that isn't the case anymore.

The ONLY software that I can't run on newer distros is IBMs TSM backup
system - and the version currently running is EOL at the end of this
month. TSM seemed to lose the plot after 5.5 and add a whole heap of
stuff that makes it even less efficient. As such, I'm currently testing
replacements.

Don't get me wrong, I think I'll still run EL6 for my Xen Dom0's and use
the packages I publish (http://xen.crc.id.au) - but everything else from
mail to voip to web to routing seems to be just at home with arch. I
think Xen is making a comeback in EL7 which will make that effort
redundent - but knowing RedHat, they'll push libvirt down your throat
(urgh).

While I know there are some definate usage cases, I believe these are
getting fewer and fewer.

-- 
Steven Haigh

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