Release management thoughts for Dapper Drake

[Matthew Palmer]

On Sat, Oct 15, 2005 at 06:23:26PM +0200, Ante Karamatic wrote:
> I'm comparing time with RedHat cause RHEL is distribution that people
> use mostly on their intranet, database, misson critical servers. Of
> course, since they have support from RH. But, the point is, you will
> have hard time finding someone using RH7 on those machines. Even RHEL2.1
> would be almost impossible to find (and only 3,5 years are behind that
> distribution).

I take it that you're not involved in supporting enterprises in any great
depth, because this comment is (in my experience and that of several people
I work with) utterly incorrect.  RH7 is alive and kicking (hell, I did a
reinstall of a RH6.something a short while ago, from memory, and I have to
come up with a migration plan away from a number of RH6.x boxes shortly),
and RHEL 2.1 is still running around all over the place (although not as
much as it probably should, as a lot of people moved from RH9 straight to
RHEL3).  I recently had a new customer make the decision to use RHEL 3 on
their new SOE instead of RHEL 4, despite the knowledge that in the 3-4 years
they'll be running in this environment, it's going to get very, very out of
date.  Why?  Because they value the stability and known support from the
vendors of their application software on that platform.

In the calculus of big-company-IT, shiny new features barely rate a mention.
These are organisations that are still running large chunks of their
infrastructure on seriously outdated platforms like SCO OpenSewe^H^Hrver. 
Even on the desktops, I've seen NT 4 workstation *still* in operation -- so
it's not just servers that get the "features?  pah!  We don't need
features!" treatment.  Enterprises want stability and longevity out of their
software.

- Matt