Στις 11/05/2011 04:54 πμ, ο/η Larry Stotler έγραψε:

If openSUSE came out with a LTS like uBuntu has then it wouldn't be an issue. Not having to do an OS update for 5 years would be nice. I'm still on 11.0, which is only 3 years old.

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. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On 5/11/2011 9:20 AM, Larry Stotler wrote:

2011/5/11 Ευστάθιος Αγραπίδης<stathisagrapidis@gmail.com>:

...

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

On Wed, 2011-05-11 at 11:13 -0400, Brian K. White wrote: [Rolling release concerns...] Ditto. I have an openSUSE 10.0 system in a DMZ. A security audit is complaining that some services are running too-old code. Like Apache, or openssh, or imap to name a few. I thought I might obtain the latest source RPMS and see if I could compile those on the system. Of course, I do not have the needed -devel versions of many packages installed. And finding those for a 10.0 system will be fun. As a result, I will probably have to re-install the OS. But what to choose? I was actually considering Tumbleweed. But your arguments made perfect sense. I have been wondering what the mechanism is to choose which packages will become a part of Tumbleweed. I was guessing that using Tumbleweed would require that you constantly install any Tumbleweed updates as they become available so that your system does not get too different and thus difficult to update. So, at any given point in time, there is the 'current' Tumbleweed, and updated packages must be added in some pre-defined order. I wonder what happens if you want to install a previously-not-installed package that was added to Tumbleweed at some other point than you are adding it to your system?

But I would not touch Tumbleweed as it exists right now with a ten foot pole.

I suspect I will be on your end of the pole. Yours sincerely, Roger Oberholtzer OPQ Systems / Ramböll RST Office: Int +46 10-615 60 20 Mobile: Int +46 70-815 1696 roger.oberholtzer@ramboll.se ________________________________________ Ramböll Sverige AB Krukmakargatan 21 P.O. Box 17009 SE-104 62 Stockholm, Sweden www.rambollrst.se -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Wed, 2011-05-11 at 11:13 -0400, Brian K. White wrote:

[Rolling release concerns...]

Well said Brian On 05/11/2011 05:52 PM, Roger Oberholtzer wrote:

As a result, I will probably have to re-install the OS. But what to choose? I was actually considering Tumbleweed. But your arguments made perfect sense. I have been wondering what the mechanism is to choose which packages will become a part of Tumbleweed. I was guessing that using Tumbleweed would require that you constantly install any Tumbleweed updates as they become available so that your system does not get too different and thus difficult to update. So, at any given point in time, there is the 'current' Tumbleweed, and updated packages must be added in some pre-defined order. I wonder what happens if you want to install a previously-not-installed package that was added to Tumbleweed at some other point than you are adding it to your system?

I sure would stay away from Tumbleweed on a server installation, and honestly installing 11.4 on my servers is a definite "no go" case. Experience taught me not to install the new version for a minimum of 6 months ( oops there the 1/3 of the lifecycle is gone) as it has always been buggy and on production servers I do not need the extra load of bughunting. Even on my desktop I am still using 11.3+ ( plus is the choice of repos so I have 2.6.39-rc5 kernel, KDE4.6.3, xorg-x11-7.6-167 ) 11.4 is living in virtualbox to see its progress and stability. This has always been the case with the new releases Evergreen, IMO is the only easy solution if one wants to keep a discontinued openSUSE running yet it also has its weaknesses as the OBS repos for many of the packages are removed when a release is discontinued so if one was using anything say from obs://security:XXX project that is gone as evergreen currently does not support this yet. On the other hand as Brian mentioned I also recently started thinking to move my servers to another distro with a longer lifecyle and in addition to the ones Brian mentioned I also have Debian in mind. Togan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org