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I wish this encourages companies to look for more alternatives to RHEL and its clones. There are certainly cases where the stability of RHEL makes sense. But to
by soraminazuki 3y ago
I wish this encourages companies to look for more alternatives to RHEL and its clones. There are certainly cases where the stability of RHEL makes sense. But too often teams use them when they need latest versions of software, resulting in pointless packaging work.
The worst part about the packaging work is, the tools used to create RPM packages is showing its age. RPM macros, the language for describing packages, is based on text substitution which makes it tricky to write. [1] RPM builds don't do build-time sandboxing, so a package won't build consistently across machines without extreme care taken in both the package descriptions and the build environment. Even if the package itself builds and runs on the same machine, it isn't guaranteed to run on other machines too because it lacks a way to ensure reproducibility.
[1]: For example, commenting out a macro might not work as expected because the expanded text might include a newline.
- klooney 3y agoRHEL gives really good audit. They're very good with security updates, they support things for a very long time. And if you wander into Federal Government land, it's hard to use anything else.
- acatton 3y ago> I wish this encourages companies to look for more alternatives to RHEL and its clones. The issue is that there is no alternative. I'm not aware of any distro with its base and all its packages working seamlessly with SELinux enabled. Setting up SELinux in any other distro is, in my experience, an uphill battle. You need to become an SELinux expert to do so. > The worst part about the packaging work is, the tools used to create RPM packages is showing its age. Most people don't really create RPM packages, they just install them. And in this area dnf[1] is cutting edge: file-level dependency solver, delta-package downloading, parallel downloading, ... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNF_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNF_(software)
- dralley 3y ago> delta-package downloading RHEL has never used that, and Fedora has perennial discussions about killing it because the benefits rarely outweigh the costs anymore
- Cu3PO42 3y agoI have run SELinux on Fedora without too many issues. Of course, Fedora being rather closely related to RHEL that shouldn't be too surprising.
- acatton 3y agoFedora is to RHEL what Debian Sid is to Debian stable. Yes, it's not that simple, and there are some customization done. But Fedora is the playground for the next RHEL. I woudn't consider Fedora "an alternative" according to what the top-poster was describing.
- RMPR 3y ago> what Debian Sid is to Debian stable. I've heard that a lot but I don't think this is an adequate comparison (yes even with the disclaimer in the next paragraph). First of all because of the relative stability of Fedora, I've been updating my OS since Fedora 29 and every major upgrade is mostly boring. Second, there are some decisions made in Fedora that wouldn't make sense if it was merely a test bed, removing the whole Java stack comes to mind, or more recently the libreoffice debacle.
- soraminazuki 3y agoI was specifically talking about people using RHEL when they need latest versions of software. For that use case, RHEL is a poor choice. You absolutely need to create custom packages, because there are no preexisting packages. To reiterate: > There are certainly cases where the stability of RHEL makes sense. But too often teams use them when they need latest versions of software, resulting in pointless packaging work. DNF doesn't solve this specific problem.
- KAMSPioneer 3y agoThis (SELinux) is why I started using RH-family OSs more and more, and one of a few reasons why I stick with it, even though Debian's minimalism is incredibly nice. I have a book (as yet unopened) on my desk about SELinux administration, but it's huge and CentOS, Fedora, RHEL, et al. Just Work (okay, with the occasional small tweak to policies or booleans).
- yrro 3y agoSame here. I never want to go back to another distribution where all of the services on a system, including containers, are not segregated from one another by SELinux.
- bubblethink 3y ago>The issue is that there is no alternative. I'm not aware of any distro with its base and all its packages working seamlessly with SELinux enabled. Why is this a dealbreaker ? Ubuntu has apparmor which is similar. Maybe selinux is stricter/granular etc., but that's not a business level differentiator. Your company won't fail or succeed because of selinux.
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- danjoredd 3y agoI just use Fedora. When I used Red Hat briefly, I didn't notice any major differences between the two except one is the "base" of Red Hat. I can get pretty much whatever I need through dnf or flatpak. I get that Red Hat has support, but otherwise for regular consumers like me I am not sure why I would go for a Red Hat clone when Fedora exists.
- ndiddy 3y agoRed Hat is valuable for situations where you want to leave a computer running for 10+ years and not have to worry about updates breaking anything. If you are fine with doing a full OS update every 6 months and always want the latest and greatest features, you're not in the target market.
- orev 3y agoThe “correct” way to build reproducible RPMS is to use the ‘mock’ system, which addresses the concerns about inconsistent build environments.