Nico's reply to my question prompted by his response to a list question.
It was originally private because it was off-topic.  But, truth is, I am
interested to hear other folks perspectives on doing a "split"
deployment:  Fedora desktops + SL7 servers, or some other combo.

I do sysadmin part time so having a common deployment reduces the
workload.  However, the flip side is that there will always be outliers
that need bleeding edge stuff or situations where required software
cannot be installed or built on an older OS without a lot of work.

Same questions I posed to Nico.  They are in the forwarded message
below.

Btw, I want to publicly thank Nico for his responses to the list.  I've
found his responses to be very insightful and helpful.



-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: Firefox and Thunderbird unpatched question
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2016 07:35:21 -0400
From: Nico Kadel-Garcia <[log in to unmask]>
To: Ken Teh <[log in to unmask]>

I'll follow up privately since you did, but respond to the group, please.

On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 6:51 AM, Ken Teh <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Can you expound a little more on using Fedora for desktops?  Is this
> something you are doing?

Not as a matter of course, but when developers or I need bleeding edge
versions of perl or python modules, and sometimes even of various
graphical toolkits, it's often easier to provide them on Fedora.

> I've started prep work on migrating from SL6 to 7 and I'm wondering if
> it's better to do a split deployment like you have hinted:  Fedora
> desktops and SL7 servers.

Depends. If your developers or clients need bleeding edge Firefox,
Eclipse, or other tools, use what works. Fedora is effectively the
development area for RHEL releases, and thus for SL.

> One important requirement would be an auto-update between versions of
> Fedora.  Does this work well or are they usually major problems with the
> auto update?

It's not recommended, and I've not been doing it on a long-term
basis.It worked the last few times I tried it. I did occasionally have
issues with RPM's I built myself, or installed from 3rd party sources,
to get them out of the dependency lists and allow the upgrades of
other components. And the switch from SysV init scripts to systemd
just.... oh, lordie, that can be painful.

> Most of my users have to write code for their work.  Right now we have a
> common home system across machines so they can work on any machine
> including remotely via ssh servers.  Are they runtime compatibility
> issues in such a deployment?  Would deploying a software collections
> installation possibly minimize this problem?

Lord, yes. The "software collections" can help reduce the version
conflict, but it takes extra work to activate those, and they're never
complete backports of all the new tools. I wound up building roughly
160 RPM's for SL 6, using the python 2.7 software collection, to port
the python based "Airflow" tool to a stable environment, and it only
took 100 for SL 7. Fedora would have been much smaller, since many of
them were backports of Fedora packages.

> Thanks in advance for your time.  I want to say I have several of your
> messages tagged.  I've found them very helpful.

Good! Pass it on.