[NCLUG] Ousting Exchange

[Matt Taggart]

Sean Reifschneider writes...

> On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 05:33:14PM -0700, Matt Taggart wrote:
> >But RHEL is a commercial product that costs $$$ right? Debian does 3+ years 
> on 
> 
> Then use CentOS which is a community rebuild of RHEL and also has the 10
> years of updates.

Yeah I asked about CentOS further down in the message. I guess it makes sense 
that CentOS can just recompile the RHEL updates and be able to offer the same 
support period.

> My understanding was that with Debian stable it was only
> supported for the life-cycle of the release and a little more.  A very
> little more.  Even with Fedora you get updates for a year or more past when
> they roll a new release, so you aren't really having to roll when the
> upstream does.
[snip]
> With Debian, you don't have multiple versions to choose from.

As dannf already pointed out, the above are wrong.

> You have to deploy Woody until Sarge
> goes stable, and you have very little time to test Sarge until Sarge
> actually comes out.

I don't understand this sentence. How is this different from,

"You have to deploy RHEL3 until RHEL4 is released, and you have very little 
time to test RHEL4 until RHEL4 actually comes out."

> And when will Sarge come out?  ISTR that there was
> like a year where there was talk about it being released in 3 or 4 months.

Yeah Debian's release cycle is a lot more unpredictable. I think it's getting 
better with the move to the new 'testing' infrastructure (sarge was delayed in 
part because it was the first release to use it).

> With Ubuntu for example, you can deploy, wait say 4 years, in which time
> there have been 8 releases.  You can now pick one of those more recent
> releases, test against it and migrate, and still have a year to do the
> migration and yet get another 4 years before you're going to have to do it
> again.

I don't think all the ubuntu releases are going to have the same support life, 
but you're right that it does give you more options.

> That's just not something you get with the Debian "Sell no wine before it's
> time" release cycle and flast cut-overs.

The release cycle should be improving (I hope), and again you have a year+ to 
switch.

-- 
Matt Taggart
matt at lackof.org