[wplug-internet] New Linode upgrade available

[Bryan J Smith]

On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 12:44 PM, George Larson
<george.g.larson at gmail.com> wrote:
> To be fair, CentOS 5 is still legitimate by a lot of metrics.  Several of
> the VPS providers that I have looked at begin at CentOS 5 32bit because it's
> sorted first (alphabetically, ascending digits) and nobody seems to offer
> Arch.  (:

Wait!

Are you talking about moving from one extreme (trailing-edge, stable
ABI/API) to another (rolling release, constantly variable ABI/API)?

I.e., People usually don't switch "release models" in distros.

E.g.,
- Leading Source Builds:  BSD Ports, Gentoo Portage
- Leading [Semi-]Rolling Releases:  Arch, Mint DE
- Leading-Edge Packages:  Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, Fedora (previously RHL)
- Semi-Current w/select Backports:  Debian Stable, Ubuntu LTS, RHL-E
(discontinued)
- Trailing-Edge, Change Mitigated ABI/API:  SLES**, RHEL

**SLES has recently moved to rebasing some core ABIs/APIs.

One doesn't just "wake up" and decide to go from Change Mitigated
ABI/API (e.g., RHEL) to Rolling Release (e.g., Arch) overnight.  You
start to have to balance many things.  It's all about evaluating what
is appropriate.

E.g.,

If you're constantly building the latest software, then a leading-edge
packaged distro, a rolling release distro or even a source build might
be better.  Of course, that means you'r doing more integration
testing, possibly even unit testing in the case of source builds.

But if you're planning to run a piece of software for years, and need
to avoid ABI/API changes, then backporting is not optional.  The
question then becomes how much backporting do you need, and for what
components?

Red Hat finally heeded years of requests and added Software
Collections (RHSCL) as an option to RHEL.  This allows organizations
to run different versions of databases and scripting languages than in
the core RHEL ABI/API, concurrently.  These are available in CentOS as
well (SCL).

I have to warn about this because the Oracle Technical Network (OTN)
became quite infamous for providing newer scripting languages for
RHEL/OL.  E.g., I had an user call me up saying "Red Hat broke my
website with an update," and I discovered he was subscribed the system
to OTN, and Oracle had updated the repo from PHP 5.3 to 5.4.

-- bjs

P.S.  There are a _lot_ of hosting providers who will provide
out-of-date, leading-edge distros with security issues.  Be wary of
old releases!