[SLL] Fedora Legacy going away?

[Glenn Stone]

On Mon, Jan 01, 2007 at 11:19:57AM -0500, Jesse Keating wrote:
>As for upgrading to Debian, you should only do that if there is a compelling 
>thing about Debian you wish to use.  Changing distro styles because of this 
>seems silly, when there are things like CentOS which provide the same 
>lifespan as RHEL but for free (you just don't get any support, which you 
>didn't with Fedora either).

I'm going to have to back Jesse up here.... Swapping to Deb from Fedora when
you're trying to keep up a commercial level of customer support isn't to be
undertaken lightly, particularly when there is CentOS out there (and all the
Dag Weers stuff that can get you most of the oddball packages that are in
Fedora but not in RHEL)... there are more than enough differences between
how RPMish OS's are laid out and how Debish ones are that it trips *me* up,
and I maintain both of'em every day.  (Well, OK.  I don't mess with RHEL
*every* day.  But rare is the day I'm not seeing a Debian hash prompt.)

Frankly, if I was going to flip, barring oddity of hardware, I would likely
go with Ubuntu, not Debian, particularly for a commercial site... just for
the support aspect if nothing else.  But were I in a situation where I was
already comforatable with RPMish systems, already had a bunch of them
deployed, etc.... I'd probably just stay with that.  For doing just plain
solid stable stuff, no rocket science, CentOS (with a few extra
repositories) will do just fine.  

Jesse does make an excellent point... if you're using the free version, and
you make a hack or even just catch a bug, take the time to post it, even if
it's just here... and if you have the man-hours, swat a bug every once in a
while.  It all helps.  

-- Glenn
p.s. Happy GNU Year! :)