Hello all. Just investigating for the future: or shall we (we = all of us using SL(X) go Scientific Linux 5 .. or maybe re-base to CentOS 5 ? From what I can personally see, and looking at past years I believe we are seriously missing resources necessary to develop SL to become something more than a Red Hat 'clone' ... all of 4-5 (sorry if I missed some!) people contributing are obviously overloaded with their other work in the labs ... The only added value of SL (comparing to CentOS) as I see it now is: 1). Adding to anaconda the 'sites' functionality 2). Adding AFS client (plus few more packages). (well, there are few more customizations but these are minor I would say) I believe that above could be addressed by a different solution in the future: RHEL 5 anaconda should be able to use (during installation) additional yum repositories (therefore packages we put in 'site' could come from there..) : - we could possibly use that mechanism in order to build our own 'branches': Fermi, CERN, DESY .. etc .. Additional packages (not already present elsewhere) could be submitted to CentOS contrib / centosplus repos (if general purpose) ... or a new addon CentOS repository. Adopting the above would permit us to spend more time on something which was supposed to be one of our main goals ... and what is not really achieved: adding 'scientific' packages to the distribution... What is you opinion about re-basing on CentOS ? Pros ? Cons ? Let me start the list: - Pros: - Avoiding duplicating what already has been provided by linux community. - Joining 'forces' with others having very similar goal (free linux with long livetime 100% RHEL compatible) - Having more time for development of parts of distribution really related to 'science'. (or other areas used developed in our labs: cluster management, HSM, managed desktops ... etc.) - Much larger 'userbase' (see mailing lists !) - Much larger 'expertbase' for community support. - Lots of personal time of some of us saved (all these alpha/beta/rc releases ... plus tests ... ) [well: I don't know how it is in your labs: but we at CERN cannot spend more than 20%-25% of FTE (Full Time Equivalent) on linux distribution preparation ..] - Cons: - ? Please reply to the list what are your opinions about the above: - I believe that it is right time to discuss such possibility: RHEL 5/CentOS 5/SL 5 are not out yet and I believe there will be no urgency to deploy it in our labs anytime soon (certainly not at CERN: we are just migrating to 4: we will not be permitted to go forward during LHC startup and also most likely not in 2008 ..) Cheers Jarek (frequently overloaded SLC maintainer ;-)) __ ------------------------------------------------------- _ Jaroslaw_Polok ___________________ CERN - IT/FIO/LA _ _ http://home.cern.ch/~jpolok ___ tel_+41_22_767_1834 _ _____________________________________ +41_78_792_0795 _