Re: Red Hat RPMs?

["Andreas Hasenack" <ahasenack@terra.com.br>]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 8:10 AM, Tony Earnshaw <tonni@hetnet.nl> wrote:
> 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.

If I were a RH, SuSE, Mandriva, whatever, customer who paid thousands
of dollars for the product and were having specific issues with their
supported packages, I would open support requests. It's that simple. I
don't care about their agenda, or whether they bought some other
product or not. It's in the contract.

Now, some customers (most?) might not want to run the so called
"latest stable version" of any given software if things are working
just fine for them (luck, or they just don't use the broken feature).
So RH does has to think about the bigger picture. I suppose, however,
that they could provide special build packages outside of the main
distro channels.