[ale] Distro Reply

[Greg]

 ... and the space shuttle ran on a MacSE-30 ...

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org]On Behalf Of James
Baldwin
Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 3:08 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] Distro Reply


On 3 Jan 2005, at 22:28, Jerald Sheets wrote:

> Don't take that as a slam.  It isn't.  It's real-world, eterprise (read
> data-ceter) class expereience in mission critical (read patient's
> records
> and lives) data environments.

The speech by Dan Klein of USENIX at LISA 2004 was spot on wrt Linux in
mission critical applications.

Description: "We all know that "Linux is better than Windows." Few
intelligent people would board a fly-by-wire airplane that was
controlled by Microsoft Windows. So how about Linux? When your life is
at stake, your attitudes change considerably. Better than Windows,
yes?but better enough? This talk will look at what it takes to make
software truly mission-critical and man-rated. We'll go back to the
earliest fly-by-wire systems?Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo?and look at
such diverse (but critical!) issues such as compartmentalization,
trojans and terrorism, auditing and accountability, bugs and boundary
conditions, distributed authoring, and revision control. At the end of
this talk, what you thought might be an easy answer will be seen to be
not so easy."

Presentation slides can be found here:
http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa04/tech/talks/klein.pdf

On 4 Jan 2005, at 12:08, Geoffrey wrote:

> Yes I do.  THe whole thread was started regarding choosing a distro
> for an production environment.  I can't see putting something into
> such an environment with a kernel that is that old.

I think you're confusing a feature freeze with a code freeze. While the
earlier kernels (2.0, 2.2, and 2.4) are no longer actively _extended_
they are actively maintained. Bug fixes and security fixes are back
ported.

For instance, the latest 2.4 kernel is from Nov 17th, so the feature
set is "old" but the kernel is not.

Likewise with the software in the Debian package management system.
Software in the stable branch incorporates bug fixes and security
fixes, however, it does not incorporate new and untested features and
code.

---
James Baldwin