[ale] Distro Reply

[James Baldwin]

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
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