RHEL6

[David Farning]

On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 11:33 AM, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
> On 13 November 2010 13:05, Yioryos Asprobounitis <mavrothal at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Back in April, there was a long discussion ( http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2010-April/thread.html#28118 )
>> about RHEL6 as a base for an LTS OLPC/Sugar base.
>> I was wondering if with the arrival of RHEL6 these thoughts are re-entertained, at least for the x86 machines.
>> By the time RHEL6 is outdated most of the x86 XOs will be dead or close to it. So such a move now would free any resources that should be doing fedora catch up for the XO-1s and XO-1.5s and allow unobstructed software development of the ARM-based
>
> I think Martin is keen on it for the XS, but for the XO we really need
> closer distro integration than what we can achieve with RHEL.
>
> The biggest issue is that only certain Red Hat employees can push
> packages and updates to RHEL. If OLPC were to use it, we'd have to be
> very dependent on those employees, or do a lot more package/distro
> forking than present.
>
> The working I'm doing at the moment (which will become more
> community-visible soon) has the aim of making jumping between Fedora
> versions less painful than before.

As Activity Central we are going to see about the practicality of
basing a long term support Dextros on RHEL.

We will start work within a couple of months.  But, as Daniel states,
there are several factors which make basing on RHEL difficult.  My
primary concern is the rate of change in the underlying gtk libraries
and how that will affect rebasing on new versions of Sugar.

Daniels work with OLPC-so-builder has created an increase of recent
releases which is good from a developer POV.  For example, we can
easily do large scale testing.  But from a educator, service and
support POV we need to keep the number of release to a minimum.  For
example, it is often easier for a teacher to work around know bug than
to discover and deal with new bugs in new releases.

There is probably no 'Right' answer.  So it become a matter of
available resources and resource allocation.

david