Fwd: A couple of rants about Launchpad

[David Gerard]

whoops, to list as well!

/me curses gmail


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>
Date: 2009/3/6
Subject: Re: A couple of rants about Launchpad
To: Matthew Nuzum <matthew.nuzum at canonical.com>


2009/3/6 Matthew Nuzum <matthew.nuzum at canonical.com>:

> This is not to be perceived as saying anything either for or against
> CentOS. Just don't be mistaken into thinking it comes with some kind
> of support.


Oh, not at all - the way we do it is to buy RHEL for the Oracle
machines and the ones visible to a jumpy CEO, and run equivalent
CentOS on the rest ;-)

The point is that *someone* is maintaining the OS for 7 years. For
what we use it for, this is important - we don't want the latest
candy, we want a box that's solid for seven years.

My main point originally, I think, was that dist-upgrade in Ubuntu is
way too broken for serious use. I would be horrified at the idea of
subjecting a nontechnical user to the things I've had to do to upgrade
Ubuntu to a supposedly-stable next version. *It fails more often than
not.* And this is not hardware issues, this is the package dance.

What would it take? A testing chain running and rerunning the listed
supported upgrades? We don't support everything to everything like
Debian do, but we do say "hey, these upgrade paths will work just
fine" and ... they don't. I have had to acquire Debian admin skills
just to keep my Ubuntu running - this does not solve bug#1.


- d.