fc2 or not, that is the question...

[Alexander Dalloz]

Am Sa, den 15.05.2004 schrieb Jay Daniels um 18:13:

> after finding out you will have to upgrade to a new version of fedora
> every 3 months, I question my decision on using fedora.

I had the impression you was a regular reader and poster on this list.
Sorry, did you sleep? Who and where did you tell that new Fedora
releases come out 4 times a year? And who urges you to upgrade as soon
as a new stable release is out?

Obviously that are rhetoric questions. On the Fedora Project site you
can read that new Core releases are planned to come out just 2 times a
year. And that is because Fedora intends to be leading edge, a
distribution for the desktop and for enthusiastic users wanting to use
the recent applications and technologies.

And the Fedora Project page states too that bug fixing packages for the
Core release are to be expected 2 to 3 month after a new Core release is
out.

The Fedoralegacy project intends to prolong that IIRC for about 3 month.
So in all a Fedora Core release can be kept safe for a period of 1 year.
Is that bad for a distribution with the goals it has?

> i am seriously considering ol' faithful slackware for the server since
> it still has apache 1.3... and a few apps i want to use require 1.3.

Well, if you really need Apache 1.3 for specific applications I think
Fedora was from beginning a bad choice by you.

> i had serious problem compiling apache 1.3.(latest), mod_perl and php
> 4 on this fedora box.  honestly, it's a pain in the arse the way all the
> packages are split up into different rpms and the way pam is currently
> setup.  i did finally get everything working, but only after
> extracting libpam.la from an older version of pam-devel.  this was
> required for the current php 4 and the configure options I wanted.

Compiling from source was never easy. And you certainly have to
understand how things work together.

> note: i still don't know what the .la file is or why it's missing from
> the current pam-devel, but php required it to compile.

The .la files are plain text files. Just look into a few. An example:

# libplain.la - a libtool library file
# Generated by ltmain.sh - GNU libtool 1.5 (1.1220.2.1 2003/04/14
22:48:00)
#
# Please DO NOT delete this file!
# It is necessary for linking the library.

> just wanted to know, has anyone else had such problems when compiling
> from source on rpm based distributions and are you (like me)
> considering your options since fc1 is at the end of the road?

As I said, compiling from source is not trivial and in general needs
adjusted configure options and some more.

FC1 is at the end of which road? Sorry, you only show a massive lack of
background knowledge (see my initial comment).

> for these reason and many others, i still think Redhat made a mistake
> going the fedora route.  JMHO, i also think fedora has it's place -
> separate from RH.

What are you complaining about? That you have chosen a distribution for
which you are not in the target user group? Would you complain about
Gentoo too when you see that it needs a compilation from source for
package updates (which is a "nice" job for applications like OO.org, KDE
or XFree86)?

> a few years ago a friend told me, "all you need is slackware 3.0"  he
> runs an isp and all his severs run slackware.  i'm beginning to
> believe him that slackware may infact be the most customizable distro
> when it comes to compiling from source and only installing what you
> need.  please don't say, i recommend slack 3.0 - read that line again.

You finally understand the difference between RPM (or other package
manager based distributions) based distributions and a source based.

Alexander


-- 
Alexander Dalloz | Enger, Germany | GPG key 1024D/ED695653 1999-07-13
Fedora GNU/Linux Core 1 (Yarrow) on Athlon CPU kernel 2.4.22-1.2188.nptl
Sirendipity 19:02:27 up 2 days, 16:47, load average: 0.47, 0.36, 0.22 
                   [ Γνωθι σ'αυτον - gnothi seauton ]
             my life is a planetarium - and you are the stars
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