[kwlug-disc] Switching Jobs from Debian Shop to RHEL?

[Chris Irwin]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 2:11 PM, Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:

> In the RedHat world people often have third party repositories that they
> go to bypassing the project's set of repositories.
>

This is true. The idea is that anything Red Hat ships, you should be able
to phone them and get support on. They don't typically provide the
thousands of packages, multiple init systems, parallel graphical
environments, bit-rotted old software that somehow still compiles, etc.

Downside of that narrow focus is they don't provide some cutting edge
things, and major upgrades are not likely. Thus epel (which fills 95% of
our extra package needs at work). because RHEL is such a big target, a lot
of companies provide their software in repository form (VMware, for
example).

That said, I don't actually have epel enabled on production field machines
(most of my production machines don't have Internet access anyway).


> Moreover, dependency management can be very different from Debian/Ubuntu.
> If you do a yum search on a package and find it in the configured
> repositories, that does not mean you can go ahead and installed it (which
> is true for Debian/Ubuntu). You can have something in the dependency chain
> that is not installed, and would not get installed if you say "installed
> the packages I searched for".
>

I've never had this before. If a package is in the repository, it and it's
dependencies are installable. Possibly if you're using some third-party
repo that expects some other third party repo, you could have this
situation. But you can get that with Ubuntu PPAs, too, since they can
inter-depend.


> So, you are back looking for the best repositories out there, and there is
> considerable learning beyond "it is just rpm vs deb differences".
>

You still can do the repository hunting with Ubuntu, too. What PPA has
proper GNOME? Does it work with Canonical's patched GTK+? I believe I had
about ten PPAs enabled when I was an Ubuntu user -- everything from updated
nvidia drivers to not-so-old chromium builds. A lot of software projects
provide their own PPA to get their current releases out on Ubuntu, too.
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