[TriLUG] CentOS status

[Michael Kimsal]

I guess I never understood what the kerfuffle was all about.

Someone asked "is CentOS viable?"

I said "it depends".  Nice catch all answer which answers nothing, really.
Then I gave a situation where - imo (pretty obvious it's my opinion cause
I'm giving it!) - CentOS is not a viable option.  Define "viable" I guess is
what the answer should have been.

IME (let me clarify!) the types of companies that *only* use RHEL and CentOS
do so for support reasons.  Using non-official packages has not been an
option in situations where 'support' was the primary motivating factor,
because you couldn't necessarily be 110% absolutely sure that you wouldn't
be voiding some aspect of the support/warranty situation (either from RH or
a managed hosting vendor).  My experience is probably more limited than that
of some others, but it's still been my experience.  OBVIOUSLY - everyone
else's mileage may vary.

BTW, slicehost/linode and others I've *recently* looked at offer support for
many distros, not just CentOS.  Maybe the support is *better* for CentOS?



2009/8/26 Cristóbal Palmer <cmp at cmpalmer.org>

> On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Michael Kimsal<mgkimsal at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Sure, of course.  You could also compile them by hand.  You're not using
> the
> > 'official' standard repos if you go looking for other stuff though.
>
> There's a middle ground: rpmforge.
>
> http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/RPMForge
>
> This is especially useful if you set up priorities so that you don't
> clobber the official packages with updates from rpmforge willy-nilly.
> You can also set up a personal repository in this manner and use it
> for multiple clients. This is valuable in debian/ubuntu land, too, and
> is still valuable even if the official packages are more recent in
> your distro than they are in RHEL/CentOS. There are any number of
> reasons--eg. custom configuration files; many packages ship with
> "development" defaults--that you might want your own custom package.
>
> >  If
> > you're not going to stick with official repos, and just start adding
> > whatever RPMs you need from various places, what, again is the benefit of
> > using CentOS?  Why not just use a distro that has more of what you need
> in
> > its official base?
>
> Because working with CentOS gets you in faster with clients who run
> RHEL. Because many providers (eg. slicehost, linode, rackspace, etc.
> etc.) have support staff trained on RHEL.
>
> I guess it depends on "you" and "need" in context. I use RHEL, CentOS,
> Ubuntu, FreeBSD.... each have their strengths in various contexts. The
> kerfuffle that started this thread is over, and I don't suspect it
> will stop me from using CentOS again in the future--in the same
> contexts where I would have used it in the past.
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Cristóbal M. Palmer
> "The fun thing is to try to persuade others to share your opinions
> about what rules and what sucks. Nothing is more fun than evangelism."
>  --Larry Wall
> --
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-- 
Michael Kimsal
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