[K12OSN] *EARLY* Alpha of K12LTSP 3.2

[Les Mikesell]

On Sat, 2004-08-28 at 02:20, Andrew wrote:

> Are we all clear on what Fedora is? It is redhat's test bed for 
> new features.

Yes, but Redhat develops a tiny fraction of a Linux distribution.
Most of the code comes from thousands of other developers
who are learning as they go, fixing old bugs with each
new version and improving their work.  Redhat promises to
backport the serious bugfixes into old releases for the
support lifetime of a distribution (and you can see why
this would kill them before they changed the versioning
model).  But, do you really think RH can do a better job
of making programs work correctly than the original
author?  I'll take one I know about as an example: perl
has some serious bugs that keep it from working with
an application I use unless it is 5.8.3 or newer, which
you find in fedora core 1 and later.   RHEL has something
earlier and apparently considers handling different character
sets correctly a 'feature' so they don't backport the fix. 

> Tell me would you book a flight for your 
> family across the pacific on a prototype jet? They usually fly pretty 
> well......

Analogies usually have flaws - this one omits the fact that the
only other choice is a ancient design with many well
known problems and that millions of others are using the
new prototype and find it to be a big improvement. And
if you want to carry the analogy a bit farther, you should
also consider the fact that your children will have to rely
on the new design for a long time and if you don't help
shake out the early bugs they may always pose the same problems.

> If fedora is working for you, That's great. I hope it 
> stays that way through all the projected tri-annual updates. ( deos 
> anyone get the sense that I'm somehow bitter about fedora? <G>)

I do have a certain nostalgia for the old days of RH where
everyone knew that you waited for X.2 to put the next
release in production (for X from 4 to 7 anyway).  You
can treat fedora approximately the same way by waiting
a few months after a release to install, followed immediately
by a 'yum update' to pick up the initial bugfixes. 

> I am really impressed that eric went out of his way to do this, and I 
> think it will see a surprising amount of use. It has certainly made me 
> reconsider a move to debian for my ltsp server.

Debian's versioning is even worse than fedora/RH.  How old
is that stuff that they call stable?  And if you haven't
had problems mixing stable and testing/unstable you've
just been lucky.  On a server doing classic file/print/email
services, old code is fine.  These services have been solid
for 20 years on unix.  However, k12ltsp is an odd mix of server
and desktop code and you really, really don't want to be running
old unix/linux desktop software.  There are very good reasons that
Linux on the desktop has not been popular until the last couple
of years.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com