Hi,

On Thu, Mar 30, 2006 at 11:06:51AM -0600, Troy Dawson wrote:
> Hello,
> I would like to start a conversation, that will hopefully grow into some 
> type of policy.
> 
> What makes a release Scientific Linux compatible?
> 
> What I'd like to get out of this discussion is a way so that a user, or 
> site developer can say "This package, or groups of packages, have 
> changed, therefor this release is not compatible."  Or "I can make 
> changes up to this point and still be compatible."
> 
> I don't expect this discussion to be finished quickly, possibly months, 
> or maybe even the fall Hepix, but it needs to get started at some point. 
>   I will be bringing it up at this spring Hepix.
> 
> And this isn't to single out any one site release.  There are plenty of 
> sites or branches.  Yes, it will be able to help Cern, and Fermi, say 
> "yes, we are compatible" but it could also help those people who have 
> been mixing and matching atrpm's, dag, CentOS and others.

I think dag, dries, kde-redhat and atrpms are not in the same league
as SL, CentOS, etc. The former are simple add-ons to RHEL and RHEL
compatibles and the latter are true distributions.

If a site decides to break compatibility with the base SL that would
be bad. After all the strength of all RHEL compatible distributions is
the fact that something built for RHEL will work as well on SL
including not only the mentioned oss projects, but also ISV/IHV with
their proprietary bits (I'm now thinking of HP and proliants,
e.g. simple sensor readouts for temperatures sometimes require special
closed source modules).

Of course you sometimes don't have a choice if the RHEL bits don't
serve your needs (4kstacks, no xfs etc).
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net