[nycbug-talk] OT: what version of RHEL/CentOS are you using in prod?

[David Lawson]

On Nov 22, 2011, at 7:40 PM, Scott Robbins wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 07:20:01PM -0500, Isaac Levy wrote:
>> On Nov 22, 2011, at 6:07 PM, "Matt Juszczak" <matt at atopia.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> I know we all work with FreeBSD on a daily basis but usually have a client or two (or more) using CentOS/Rackspace. 
>>> 
> 
> Well, these days, I'm more a CentOS and even Ubuntu guy--jobs change, as
> we all know. 
> 
> I'm fairly up on this.  
> 
> Short answer.  CentOS has been falling somewhat behind with updates, but
> now has a special CR repo that, even though they don't have a 6.1
> version, will keep security and other things pretty up to date.  
> 
> There is also ScientificLinux, which is almost as close to RH as CentOS
> and has paid developers.  It might be worth investigating, depending
> upon situation.  
> 
> As for 5.x vs. 6.x, everything new that we're doing is going with 6.x.
> Some of the 5.x packages are really ancient by now.  

Yeah, I'd go for 6.0, depending on your application.  You're really not going to have stability problems because of the way they track upstream, but you may see compatibility issues if your project is going to have a lot of dependencies, it'll take a little while for third parties to start releasing 6.x packages.  If you're talking web app and the database you need is packaged and you can live with, worst case, using un-packaged deps for framework dependencies, go with 6.x, it'll save you pain in the long run.  The CentOS major version upgrade process is ugly and the officially packaged versions in 5.x are really elderly in most cases.

Or you can consider Ubuntu. ;)

--Dave