IANAL, I don't work for RedHat, but IMHO... The way I see things.
RedHat was getting pressure from two sides,
on one side the desktop/end user community (and SOHO hackers)
that wanted the bleeding edge packages and ultimate features.
on the other side were companies like Dell, HP/Compaq, IBM, Oracle,
Veritas, BEA, etc....
that wanted a long release cycle with extensive QA and regression
testing on releases,
and a long support cycle.
So, they split "RedHat Linux" into 2 seperate product lines, which have
only recently begun to gel
into a comprehensible plan.
RedHat Enterprise Linux, which consists of 3 seperate sub-products
AS (Advanced Server) x86 & Itanium support, SMP support,
Large RAM support
ES ( ??Enhanced??Enterprise?? Server) x86 support, up to 2
CPU's, up to 4GB RAM
WS (WorkStation) x86/Itanium support, up to 2 CPU's, up to
4GB RAM.
right now these three sub-products are made of the same parts,
AS consists of a set of RPM's and SRPM's (mostly identical to
RedHat 7.2)
ES is a subset of the AS components (mostly everything except the
itanium kernels and
the massive SMP kernels and the large RAM kernels).
WS is a subset of ES, with the addition of itanium support from AS,
the notable missing packages from WS are things like
BIND, DHCPD, and hardware drivers
for things like SSL Accelerator cards and such that are
not generally found on workstation.
The Enterprise line of RedHat products will have a 12-18 month release
cycle,
and each release will have 5 years of errata support. Hardware
vendors and Software vendors
can only get "Certification" for RedHat compatable products with the
RedHat Enterprise line of
products. Also, RedHat is "copyrighting" their precompiled RPM's for
Enterprise products, you cannot
receive binary RPM's unless you purchase a license and you can't
redistribute RPM's that you download
via RHN using a licensed Enterprise product. (However all SRPM's for
the RedHat Enterprise packages
are available for free from RedHat's FTP sites and it's mirrors.)
The big PUSH with the RedHat Enterprise products will be integrated
vendor support, companies like
IBM and HP/Compaq will be selling branded/pre-installed versions of
RedHat linux, some even bundled
with 3rd party software apps from Veritas and Oracle. I asked my RedHat
sales rep and a sales engineer
why I should pay for an ES or AS subscription if WS had all the features
I needed, and they said,
" Because if you use WS on a server hardware platform, or install
ISV server software, you will not get
any contracted support from either the SW vendor, the HW vendor
or RedHat if you have problems."
Then there is the RedHat Linux line, which is the direct descendant of
RedHat 6.0-6.1-6.2-7.0-7.1-7.2-7.3-8.0
This is what RedHat is recommending for the SOHO user who doesn't need
to have "Certified" vendor support
This product line will have a faster release cycle (6-8 months) and will
only have 12 months of errata support
per release.
This product is "Free" both in the beer and the speech sense in that you
can download the iso's and copy
them and redistribute them as you see fit. This product line has no
certification and is on a much more bleeding
edge software set.
IMHO, they changed the version number to 9 because binaries from 8 and 7
releases are not compatable.
(I have tried using my licensed copy of Crossover-Office on Phoebe RC3
and it didn't work. :-( )
I think that other people have mentioned this as well, something about
NPTL and such...
The next release of RedHat Linux will probably be based on the 2.6 (or
will it be 3.0) kernel, and so it
also merits a revision number increase.
I think that releases like 7.2 --> 7.3 were correct in there version
cycles because they were really
99% compatable, just patches and bug fixes for the most part.
RedHat 8.0 had a whole new version of Gnome and KDE and Apache, and some
pretty major changes
in the admin tools and the OS configuration.
RedHat 9 is mostly binary incompatable with 8, not just for a joke, but
because of the NPTL support.
RedHat 10 will have a new kernel with a new memory management model and
a new scheduler and
many deprecated kernel interfaces will be wiped away.
These numbering schemes seem pretty reasonable to me....
-Ben.
Steve_Boley@xxxxxxxx wrote:
And the next one will be 10 from what I understand. Seems that Redhat had
decided to change the game and are not being too overly informational about
it.
Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: steve@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:steve@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2003 8:37 AM
To: bscott@xxxxxxxxxx
Cc: linux-poweredge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; Hoy, Mark
Subject: Re: RH 9.0?
Its not a .anything release. Its just 9
On Tue, 25 Mar 2003 bscott@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Mon, 24 Mar 2003, at 2:31pm, mhoy@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Any truth to the Slathdot article about a March 31 release of RH 9.0?
Yup.
If so, are there any upgrade issues we should start planning for?
Yup. :-)
First, it's a new release. Second, it's a new Red Hat release. Third,
it's a new Red Hat .0 release. It is *going* to have problems that will
take some time to sort out. Don't jump on 9.0 unless you are feeling
adventurous, and then only on test systems.
I have been told that the big deal in 9.0 (and the reason for the major
version number jump) is NPTL (Native POSIX Thread Library) support. I
guess
that breaks all sorts of things. YMMV.
--
Ben Scott <bscott@xxxxxxxxxx>
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