[PLUG] Upgrading from Red Hat 7.3 to ...

Paul Heinlein heinlein at madboa.com
Sat Dec 13 11:17:01 UTC 2003


On Sat, 13 Dec 2003, Evan Heidtmann wrote:

> Fedora certainly offers the vastly preferable option of upgrading
> the current system rather than completely reinstalling.  However,
> the bleeding-edge aspect of Fedora sounds ominous.  Is the
> bleeding-edge stuff just about scaring server admins into buying
> RHEL, or is there some truth to it?

Traditionally, when Red Hat released a version of its free Linux
distribution, it shipped with newer software, some of it quite
bleeding edge (e.g., libc-6, the oft-maligned gcc 2.96, NPTL). In that
regard, Red Hat always resembled Debian testing more than Debian
stable.

The Fedora releases change things in a few ways:

* Fedora comes with no support for Red Hat, Inc.

  Maybe this is a problem for some people, but I've never heard Debian
  users grumble about a lack of support from Debian, Inc. :-) Same
  thing with Gentoo, Slackware, ...  We get support from mailing
  lists, IRC, web pages, etc.

* The upgrade cycle for Fedora will be more frequent: 2-3 times per
  year rather than once per year.

  This might pose problems for admins in charge of production systems.
  It used to be that you could wait for a new Red Hat release to get
  put through a shakedown before upgrading. With Fedora, Red Hat won't
  be providing errata for older releases, so either you upgrade to
  each new Fedora Core version or you take the responsibilty for
  patching stuff yourself.

If you're the sort of admin who's comfortable running, say, Gentoo or
Debian testing on your server, then Fedora will probably work without
a hitch.

If long, long uptimes are really crucial, then Fedora isn't the way to
go.

--Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>




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