Gutsy partner repository

[Onno Benschop]

Today I had an unexpected experience which I thought would be
appropriate to share here.

On several installations I have previously installed Feisty and after
adding the feisty-commercial repository, added vmware-server. Today I
tried the same under Gutsy. I expected that it would work the same. It
didn't.

Fortunately this particular installation was a new one, but I was in the
process of making preparations for upgrading several other Feisty
installs to Gutsy where this would have seriously broken those running
installs.

Now, I realise that feisty-commercial is now called gutsy-partner, while
inconvenient, this translation isn't terminal, but vmware-server does
not appear in that repository.

It is possible that I erred in adding the commercial repository to
Feisty, though I was under the impression that adding that repository
was exactly what I was supposed to do.

What concerns me more is that we're talking about a distribution version
release here, not like say from Unstable to Testing under Debian, we're
talking about moving from one stable release, Feisty to the next release
Gutsy.

How can I as an IT solutions provider install software that will
continue to be packaged and supported?

At the moment, the best knowledge seems to be to download an .rpm and
use alien against it, hardly a satisfactory solution in my opinion. Next
I'll be recompiling kernel modules, and then I might as well run Gentoo :)

Don't misunderstand me, I'm not having a go at the team responsible for
packaging vmware, I'm trying to understand where my expectation and
reality experienced a disconnect resulting in this unsatisfactory
experience.

-- 
Onno Benschop

Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06" - E115°50'39" (Yokine, WA)
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