Wanna give me a hand debunking this?

[Lamar Owen]

On Monday 26 November 2007, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On Nov 26, 2007 12:19 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Then it still misses the need for a way to get current desktop programs
> > without wild and crazy changes in the kernel and device drivers.

> Make up your mind.  Do you care about uptime reliability for critical
> services or do you care about desktop applications? Are you seriously
> attempting to suggest that new versions of thunderbird or openoffice
> are critical in any sense of the word? 

He wants a stable kernel but a more up to date userland so that the kernel 
driver ABI doesn't change but userland does. 

I wouldn't mind that myself so that VMware and other binary modules wouldn't 
break so often, but still having cutting edge userland.

I don't think uptime reliability is part of the equation.  I think it has more 
to do with drivers and the module ABI.  Stable means different things to 
different people.

The userland of Fedora on the kernel of RHEL, I think, would meet Les's needs 
the best.  For KDE users you can already get this through running CentOS or 
RHEL and then adding the KDE-Redhat repo, which replaces large sections of 
the system with updated packages (but doesn't touch the kernel).

Of course, there is more to stability than the kernel (glibc anyone?).

I know binary modules are Considered Harmful by many; sometimes 'you gotta do 
what you gotta do.'
-- 
Lamar Owen
Chief Information Officer
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu