On 5/11/2011 9:20 AM, Larry Stotler wrote:
2011/5/11 Ευστάθιος Αγραπίδης
: Actually the Evergreen project gives openSUSE LTS support. So that it would be the answer. The projects runs for a while and it goes well.
Forgot about that. It started with 11.1(I'm still on 11.0). Since it's just starting, I'm still not sure I would base a business on it, but it would give an option. Evergreen isn't an "official" project tho, and some businesses may not want to hedge their bets on it.
Neither evergreen nor tumbleweed are good platforms for production, although evergreen should be safer just by virtue of it's basic nature of preserving existing proven packages and distribution as a whole. Tumbleweed is really a mess though. No plan at all. I would love a "rolling release SUSE" but Tumbleweed ain't it. It's far from trivial to manage updates like that, especially when the underlying distibution is not already fundamentally a rolling distro. Fundamentally, Suse is a standard model where every so often there are major changes that make little or no attempt at being in-place-upgrade-able. The existing packages spec files installer and uninstaller scripts are chock full of assumptions about the fixed known system based on the presence of a couple of suse version variables. Tumbleweed blows that all right out of the water. The problems haven't manifested too badly yet because it's so new that a tumbleweed system is still essentially the same as a 11.4 system and most rpm's will work ok by luck. Tumbleweed would really need all packages to be specifically written to expect to be installed in a Tumbleweed-like system, where instead of trying to check for a suse version, you check for "is this tumbleweed" and if so, then you check for all the specific things your package needs to know directly, or if you can manage it, by checking for the version numbers of other packages, or possibly by a tumbleweed+datestamp. There are so many details some packages need to know in order to install and integrate correctly that are not the same from distro to distro or from version to version, or from package version to package version. Tumbleweed today is just a slapdash throw some new packages in a repo that don't seem to break at the moment, oh and if you use the Tumbleweed repo you can't use _any other repos besides the distro base ones_. Physically you can, you just have to know to manually override everything to keep the wrong packages from installing. That's not exactly smooth or reliable or safe or practical or supportable. Basically a rolling Suse is a nice idea but it's not being implemented at all thoughtfully yet. I would encourage the _idea_. I would encourage more people to decide they wanted a system like that, and get a real usable solution developed. Especially with the new short, and arbitrary (both items evil) release cycle that makes a standard suse version unsupported before even the major bugs have been discovered and worked out, and leaves production servers that can't be upgraded needing to run for another 3 or 4 years without further support even in the minimal form of an available software repo install/reinstall packages unless I am careful to collect and maintain a mirror myself before they go away. A rolling release distro solves the problem of maintaining a lot of production boxes of various ages but all trying to perform the same current job, but making all boxes always current, WITHOUT the risky and frankly impracticale to impossible in-place whole distro major version upgrades. Instead there are just a constant stream of individual package upgrades and each of those is safer and easier to test, verify, and if need be back-out. That's becoming such a problem for me I'm starting to seriously consider switching everything over to Arch or Gentoo even though I have years invested in SUSE experience, integration, and optimization. But I would not touch Tumbleweed as it exists right now with a ten foot pole. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org