A. Pagaltzis wrote: Before I reply, I'd like to thank you personally for all the time and effort you've put into our Wiki. We're in your debt :)
What I see is a platform that is "static", "unchanging". I can rely on it being the same tomorrow as it was yesterday. If I'm administering something this is what I want.
Yeah, exactly. A platform which is bug-/security-fixed forever, without actual software updates further than what is backwards compatible with the status quo.
Yeah. I really like that there is still active development on the 2.0 tree, it means that I can feel assured that if I develop anything for Linux then there will be supported for practically ever. I wish distros would do this, fix security flaws in all previous versions of their software, not that I ever expect anyone to ever do this for practical reasons.
Discovering you have to rewrite large applications because PHP now comes with register_globals off.
Which, in all fairness, is something that needed done. But the fault is really PHP's more so than RedHat's, and that's a rant for another time.
Yeah. However, it was right when Redhat were saying that they weren't going to support the old version anymore. "Upgrade or die!" which means that you suddenly have to rewrite a LOT of code.
In all fairness, again, RedHat have made some brazen moves that I believe needed doing (switching to UTF-8 entirely was the latest one -- unfortunately it broke a lot of stuff); much like I applaued Apple for making the first computer entirely without legacy hardware ("no serial ports and no floppy disk?!?"). It's inconvenient at the time, but it has to be done at some point for the whole of the community/ business/ whateveryouwanttocallit to move forward.
I'm really happy that someone is doing this. I love glibc, I love pam, and I would love to see UTF-8 apps. John McPherson and I spent quite a whle getting the wiki UTF-8 clean.
Of course, on a server, that's exactly what you *don't* want to happen. Which was my point, that Debian is top choice for a server, but not the desktop and not for developers' machines (which is were those brazen changes should happen first and frequently).
Exactly. I've not found a nice distro I like to code on yet, other than Debian Unstable. I keep hearing good things about Gentoo. Next time I have to reinstall my machine, I'll probably install Gentoo to give it a whirl.