[ale] CentOS repositories question

[Jim Kinney]

On May 12, 2015 9:25 AM, "DJ-Pfulio" <DJPfulio at jdpfu.com> wrote:
>
> On 05/12/2015 08:07 AM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> > there's no excuse for third party vendors to not keep their product
current.
>
> I have an excuse.
>
>                Cost.
>
> The vendor dev team is working on new features, new platforms and new
> customizations for NEW contracts. Every platform supported, tested,
maintained
> adds cost.  When a client asked us to support brand new or really old
platforms,
> too small to do that.  We already supported 12 platforms with a team of 6
> people.  That was 1 current version per OS and perhaps 40 customizations
1-2 for
> each client.

I thought doing packaging only for LTS releases was the only way a small
vendor could offer support. Test code and new features go in the 6-9 month
release OS platforms.

So a single release of your product for RHEL 6 will also support centos 6
and SuSE 10 and a repackaging/recompile/relink will work for Ubuntu 12 and
Debian wheezy (?). New features are for new customers on new platforms.

So you have an interim release for centos 6.5 that adds new features.
Existing customers can upgrade to the new version based on $$$ :-) unless
you're just giving it away and only selling support.

Look at setting up a koji system to support builds across all rpm
platforms. I assume debian and ubuntu have something similar.

Yeah. A small software shop has to pick and choose their battles. Sometimes
I've seen requirements of only kernel versions, libs and ram. But those had
most of their own libs compiled in.
>
> We did offer to support more versions only for the largest customers for
huge
> support costs. Nobody bought it - it was almost as much as the cost of the
> software.  Our server room was already full, software licenses to create
our
> software were expensive, plus the storage, backups, and people to do the
work -
> all costs money AND time.
>
> For example, I run Ubuntu Server and wish that no developers ever released
> software for non-LTS versions.  I consider all of those alpha releases.
6-9
> months of "support" is a joke.  If all the commercial software vendors got
> together and agreed on a "best practice support model" - then followed
it. That
> is the best we can hope.  Get the major 5 vendors to do it to get the ball
> rolling. It will take 5 yrs, so old contracts expire.  I don't know
enough about
> RHEL support to suggest anything.
>
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