[2252] in SIPB_Linux_Development
Re: Linux Athena questions
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Sun Oct 18 21:32:32 1998
Date: Sun, 18 Oct 1998 21:32:17 -0400 (EDT)
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: tb@MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)
Cc: amu@MIT.EDU, svalente@MIT.EDU, linux-dev@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: "[2249] in SIPB_Linux_Development"
> Aaron, do I understand you to say that if you were making the choice
> today, you would base Linux Athena on Debian? You mention that
> RedHat is "starting to lag". Could you elaborate?
Aaron's complaints about Red Hat's performance appear legitimate and
aggravating. But I'll argue for the other side. With the advent of
AFS 3.5 support for Linux, IS may be reconsidering support of a Linux
port of Athena, and will probably consider the following points in
favor of Red Hat:
* Many of Aaron's grievances are somewhat excuseable because
Red Hat Linux 4.2 is well over a year out of date at this
point.
* Red Hat Software has had an influx of capital and may be
able to provide better support as a result.
* Some commercial software we might be interested in only
claims to support Red Hat Linux, so getting vendor support
might be harder on a Debian system. (We'd want to verify
this on a factual basis before considering it a compelling
argument.)
(Plus, of course, that SIPB has already mostly done a port to Red Hat
Linux 5.1 and there would be more unknowns if we redid it for Debian,
and there are existing customers of SIPB's port who are using Red Hat,
but those are conversion costs which you aren't interested in.)
