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/
