On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 01:14:32PM -0400, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
[ **NOTE: Is there any overriding reason RHEL is making the
"jump" from 2.1 to
3.0? Are major kernel changes, like NPTL, going into the kernel? I'm just
curious. I'm kinda wondering why this is on "2.2" since RHEL hasn't
been
around for that many versions yet. ]
Well, perhaps the taroon beta list would be a better place for that
discussion, but...
First of all: It did not jump to "3.0". There's no ".0" in it.
Just
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3" with no decimal or decimal-ish part.
There are lots of changes. I think the more interesting questions would
probably be what *hasn't* changed. Yes, NPTL is in. If I tried to present
the new features here I'd miss lots of them, even in my area of the kernel.
I know that our sales force has the capability to talk about the features
that have been added.
> And it's possible that over time, changes such as new RPM
macros might
> be added that require some changes to build on RHEL3.
Er, um, that might start causing some issues. I would at least like to see
some consistency in the package manager itself.
We're not going to avoid deploying new technology in Fedora just because
you want to be able to build Fedora packages on RHEL. :-)
If you look historically, the changes have tended to be small and
manageable most of the time.
But let's take a concrete example of a major change. Let's say, for
example, that RPM was changed so that you didn't have to list patches
in one place any apply them in another; that you could say something
like
%patch(foo-1.0-fixblah.patch) -p1
in the prep section, and RPM wouldn't need a separate
Patch0 foo=1.0-fixblah.patch
line to know that the foo-1.0-fixblah.patch file existed and should
be packaged.
We wouldn't wait until a version of RHEL had that capability to start
to use in in Fedora packages. If you wanted to rebuild the modified
packages, you'd have to modify the spec files.
This is probably an area where Red Hat's internal developers
should try
to "advise" on. Again, it's in Red Hat's own best interest to do so,
to keep
people buying their RHEL products.
fedora-devel-list is where we'll be talking about any such changes.
I'm looking for, more or less, the ability to add basic
applications from
Fedora to RHEL.
And it's simply not a promise we're making. It might work on a
technical basis, opportunisticaily, though if you replace RHEL3
apps with hand-built ones you'll want to check your SLA wording
to see what it does to your support level.
michaelkjohnson
"He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book."
Linux Application Development -- Ben Franklin
http://people.redhat.com/johnsonm/lad/