EL6 RPMs for Fedora 14 Issue

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 12/22/2011 01:09 PM, Peter Dufault wrote:
> On Dec 22, 2011, at 6:49 , Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>
>> CentOS is a server distro, which is aiming at "long term API stability".
>> In general, it's a good choice to run a web-server or a data base server
>> on it, but is a bad choice for development purposes.
> I would have agreed until I found the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) packages.  Centos/Epel may not be good for working on the head, but it is good for working on products, and with the EPEL packages I've only had to build a few things myself.
Well, EPEL doesn't change much about the key weakness of CentOS: The API 
and ABI freeze CentOS is based on.

I.e. one sooner or later one gets stuck in CentOS being tied to ancient 
ABI/APIs which will prevent packages on it to take advantage of new 
features or from being added to CentOS at all.

This isn't much of a problem for RH and CentOS, because of the very 
small set of packages they provide and because of the man-power RH 
deploys to RHEL, but it is an actual problem for EPEL and is a problem 
for RTEMS.

Real world example from RTEMS: Some time ago, I could not avoid to stop 
supporting CentOS4, because it did not supply necessarily recent 
versions of packages RTEMS needs. ATM, ... CentOS5 is at a comparable 
stage as CentOS4 was then :-)

That said, it's not a matter of if we once will be forced to abandon 
certain versions of CentOS, it's only a question of when.

Ralf