Re: Red Hat RPMs?

[Tony Earnshaw <tonni@hetnet.nl>]

Gavin Henry skrev, on 21-02-2008 11:00:

> BTW, has anyone over the history of the "well-known" broken Red Hat RPMs 
> raised bug reports etc. and had any response? I'm not sure what effort 
> has been put into this and whether it's worth picking it up again?

I've been using Red Hat since 7.2 and OpenLDAP since RHEL3 (OL 2.0.27 
with ldbm). Because I wanted much more info and support than Red Hat 
could give I joined the OL ML; that would have been in early 2003. As 
far as Red Hat support is concerned I've never used it for anything - 
I'm not the one in the firm who decided for Red Hat, though I did and do 
still second the choice after trying SuSE and Mandrake (lately Debian 
Sarge and Etch too). Red Hat has good general documentation and comes 
near up to the SYSV Unix I'd been using (UnixWare, Irix, Solaris) in 
philosophy.

Already then the list deprecated ldbm and the current OL version was 2.1.

> As most users first experience of OpenLDAP is via the RH and Fedora 
> RPMs, I think some effort (if it's not a waste of time again) should be 
> put into trying to raise our concerns, as it harms the project in the 
> long run.

Diverse OL ML contributors have been slaying Red Hat's OL offerings 
since I joined, including me. I once got a rise from a Red Hat lurker 
when I attacked the policy of charging US$ 15,000 per server for OL. Red 
Hat's people lurk on the OL list (and doubtless on this one) but rarely 
utter.

Red Hat has a vested interest in supplying useless OpenLDAP products, 
since RH has acquired Netscape Directory for lots of money and supports 
this too at US$ 17,000 (so I've read) per master server, much less for 
slaves. Although it's made this into an open source project, it 
obviously has a near monopoly as far as support goes.

The problem for both Red Hat and Fedora in keeping up with OL 
development is that new OL versions are released much more frequently 
than the distro release policies allow. Further, the OL development team 
is such a small and tightly knit team of experts, that I personally 
doubt that Red Hat has developers who would be technically competent to 
work with them - let alone get along with them on a personal level.

> Currently we have SuSE, Mandriva and Debian guys on the lists who care 
> (you all know who you are ;-) ).

To my mind Mandrake has found the right level with Cooker, which Red Hat 
(through its distro policy) can't possibly emulate. As for Fedora, I see 
that the current FC8 (stable) OL release is 2.3.38, and db4 is 4.6.21, 
so that's OK, BUT there's no way those two could be incorporated into 
RHEL5 (for example) without doing what Buchan does. And by the time 
RHEL6 comes along (2009? May 2009 will be 2 years after RHEL5 was 
released), possibly based on FC8 or FC9, OL 2.3 will be a dead duck and 
people will all be using OL 2.4.

> Anyone from Red Hat or Fedora here?

As I wrote, I'd guess at 100% certainty, but you'll be lucky to get a peep.

Best,

--Tonni

--
Tony Earnshaw
Email: tonni at hetnet dot nl