Talk:Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivatives

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents

[edit] Article name

Previous discussion of the article's old name has been rendered moot by the current name. (Thus, removing text from here, get it from the "history" of this page if necessary) JimD 20:51, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New section: Technical Challenges?

I think we should add a section to the article which discussion the technical challenges associated with building these clones (such as CentOS). However, I want to hash it out here before migrating it into the main article.

I know that one cannot simply take the whole collection of .src.rpm files (source packages) and simpy run a command like: for i in /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/*.spec; do rpmbuild -ba $i; done One problem with that approach is that many of these build processes run GNU autoconf and thus will find and link against various libraries on the system. However, many packages are built by Red Hat Inc. in an environment containing only a specific subset of the total available libraries (mostly using chroot() jails). There are, potentially, other options and environment settings which could affect how the packages are built from source into binaries.

Also when creating CD images ... generate index files, etc. there are a number of utilities which are included in the sources ... and which Red Hat uses to build their CDs ... but which are largely undocumented. (The specific calling conventions for each of the utilities is not included in the sources nor in any available documentation.

(One can argue that these, admittedly minor, details constitute Red Hat's "secret sauce" for cooking up their final product. However, that's no truly relevant to the proposed section of this article).

I'd love for some of the contributors and participants of CentOS, White Box, et al. to flesh this out with some more examples ... or provide a link to any good online discussion of the topic.

JimD 20:51, 1 February 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Changes to motivations section

The article previously suggested that Red Hat is required to make RHEL's source code available for download. This is not true. Under the GPL, if Red Hat gives or sells binaries to anyone, those binaries must be accompanied by source code. The transferee can then redistribute the source code or compiled binaries (provided he complies with the GPL.) Nothing in the GPL says that Red Hat has to set up an FTP server, pay for bandwidth, etc.

[edit] Clones or derivatives?

Should these not be called derivatives instead of clones ? -- Ernst de Haan 15:38 17 October 2006 (GMT+1)

I second that. I think cloning more strongly implies exact replication. The derivatives, work-alikes, or similar notions each add (or possibly subtract) from the base RHEL distro. Joe 22:09, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

If you don't mind, I'll go out and be bold and move the article to Red Hate Enterprise Linux derivatives—some articles may need editing so they don't point to a redirect though; I think I'll nag the RHEL and CentOS pages myself. --Mike (talk) 06:16, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] accuracy of Fedora release cycle (history)

Actually, the release cycle is stated as a month after final release of the second following release. or about 13 months. See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LifeCycle . However, I am not sure of the previous policy; I seem to recall from before it was 18 months, but I may be remembering some other distro, perhaps RHL9 or 8.0. Joe 22:09, 16 September 2007 (UTC)