[ale] Question on RH

[John Knight]

Hi Scott,

It's indeed an interesting question.  The answer is quite useful in 
knowing the value of RHEL in a commercial setting.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is created by period forks of the Fedora Linux 
project.  Fedora is the community project funded by Red Hat that 
contains the newest packages and is tested across a wide audience.  Many 
bugs are present when packages are updated across the board and Fedora 
is rebuilt by Koji (their build system) to ensure that there are no big 
breakages with the build process.  New technologies are quickly adapted 
in this software channel.

Every 2-4 years, Fedora is forked into the new RHEL version.  RHEL 5 was 
forked from Fedora Core 6 and RHEL6 was forked from rawhide somewhere 
between Fedora 12 and Fedora 13.

It is said that you can tell the direction where the next RHEL is headed 
by keeping an eye on the Fedora distribution. Indeed, by using Fedora 
10/11/12/13 I was quite prepared to operate RHEL6 and how it differed 
from RHEL5.

Once the fork for the creation of a RHEL release forms, there are 
generally no new packages added to it (there are exceptions: recently 
X.org 1.10 was updated in RHEL 6.2 and Firefox/Xulrunner/Thunderbird 
were all updated to 10ESR from 3.6.x).  Instead, the packages stay at 
the same version for the duration of that RHEL branch.  There are 
updates but these are generally broken down into two categories:  1) 
Security updates and 2) backports.

#1 is very important.  Anyone running Fedora after that versions EOL 
will no that no future updates are released for that version leaving you 
to run a release that has effectively been abandoned or update to the 
new release (complete with new packages and usually a whole new set of 
bugs to work around).

#2 is equally important as it allows Red Hat to support newer hardware 
that was not available at the time of release of the original Fedora 
that that RHEL version was based on.  Adding support for new processors 
such as Sandy Bridge and porting new features generally only found in 
newer kernels and other packages are provided in RHEL point releases.  
Though the kernel release stays at 2.6.32, for instance, it is hardly 
the vanilla upstream 2.6.32.  Instead it has many features backported 
from a future kernel.

Hope that answers your question. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux  Wikipedia has 
even more information.


<http://www.classiccitytelco.com>

*John Knight*

Classic City Telco LLC
*Email:* john at classiccitytelco.com | *Main:* (706) 995-0200
*Direct:* (706) 995-0201 | *Mobile:* (678) 308-0322


On 04/20/2012 02:09 PM, Scott Steele wrote:
> I had someone ask me an interesting interview question today, The 
> question is:
>
> "How does Red Hat Enterprise get created and how does its code flow?"
>
> Any thoughts?
>
>
>
>
>
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