[Annatar]

I'm merely answering the "what's wrong with Redhat Linux?" question: it's enough to go to bugzilla.redhat.com and pull the publicly open priority 1 critical bugs, read the exchange between users and redhat and a pattern emerges. Never mind what I wrote and what I suffer through on RHEL every day, let's ignore and discount that; it's the exchanges in the priority 1 bugs that tell the tale for themselves far better than I ever could.

Try building RPM's between .el5, .el6 and .el7, the macro definitions are ripped out and (partially) put back in or modified for more often than every ten years. And that's just one example of many. Starting with .el6 they made their RPM backend scripts bust if -Wl,--build-id isn't used in CXXFLAGS, CFLAGS, and FFLAGS because they modified their castrated compiler to encode that automatically and rely on it instead, so if you roll your own fixed version of the compiler but don't implement that, all your RPM builds are suddenly broken. Now I have to put that work-around in my compilers. Should I go on? I've got plenty of technical details...

So yeah, they should go into web and not touch OS and kernel engineering ever again.

[lima]

Looking at prio 1 bugs for a huge distro like RHEL is not going to paint an accurate picture.

I've had production experience with all the major distros except SUSE, and Red Hat's QA is miles ahead anyone else's. Canonical/Ubuntu do a particularly bad job at it, for instance.

That's not to say there aren't any issues with it, and I've personally experienced a few (the devicemapper Docker driver, for example, caused a lot of trouble for me and I'm glad they did the right thing and built overlayfs), but overall, their engineering is very solid.

[Annatar]

You've never used a traditional UNIX if you think redhat's engineering is solid, have you?

[lima]

> There exist no words in any of the languages I speak which can express my hate of GNU and GNU/Linux.

We might not find much common ground there :-)

I'll bite: I worked with a bunch of HP-UX systems before they got decommissioned a few years ago, so I can attest both to how well-built the operating system is, as well as how painful it was to get anything modern running on them. I also keep an eye on SmartOS/SmartDataCenter.

However, how does this make Red Hat's engineering bad?

[Annatar]

HP-UX was hard to get started on building software, but once one builds up a base of common libraries, it gets easier and easier, just like it did on Solaris.

hp's engineers never broke backward compatibility. The OS is lightning fast and rock solid. That takes a lot of insight and knowledge.

redhat constantly brakes things, I find things which work yetsterday that break tody, even in the same mainline release. They couldn't even get shutdown to work correctly, a couple of years back when we were working on integrating XFS (and they were still resisting it), the kernel was panicking because they were trying to write to an unmounted filesystem; that was 18 years into Linux's development.

SmartOS engineers would never do such a thing on purpose, as they are guided by the 'empathy is still a core engineering value', put in words in an answer by Keith Wesolowski, and in those very rare cases when they do, they fix it immediately.

With redhat we get constant finger pointing between them and the hardware vendor, they never act responsible for anything although we pay them lots of money. What the hell are we paying them for then? They can't even engineer proper code and drivers for their own OS for the hardware they officially support. That's not engineering, that's hacking!

The worst by far is their lack of architecture. Take Satellite for example, with their concept of channels: unbelievably confusing and complicated. Have you tried integrating your own RPM's into it? The needless complexity!

We had Satellite filling up an Oracle tablespace with irrelevant garbage log information even though we just installed it; I called redhat up and asked them how to lower the amount of information Satellite is generating so that it wouldn't constantly fill up the tablespace. Their support told me that I have to go talk to Oracle because it's an Oracle database problem! Yeah, they are that kind of experts!

[nailer]

Solaris had XML config files and wouldn't boot if you had a tab character in vfstab.

[Annatar]

Only SMF uses XML and SQLite behind the scenes. While that is a poor choice of configuration format, SMF is considered the Golden standard which all others try to re-invent and re-implement (not invented here syndrome), because SMF has been working reliably for more than a decade, and all added capability doesn’t break backwards compatibility, so an SMF manifest you wrote ten years ago works without modifications on the latest and greatest nightly build of illumos. That’s system engineering as opposed to haphazard hacking. I use drivers in the latest illumos from 1995 and they run without recompilation or modification. I’d like to see GNU/Linux pull that one off.

As for \t not working in vfstab(4), it’s simply not true, as all my vfstab(4) files use the [TAB] characters to line up the fields.

[qiqitori]

> Now I have to put that work-around in my compilers.

That seems really minor to me... Just because it takes a long time to find the root cause of a bug doesn't mean that the root cause was a stupid decision.

Disclaimer: I partially work as a developer/support engineer for a RHEL-derived OS, but use Debian at home.

[Annatar]

It's a lot of engineering to roll out one's own compilers, especially if one wants to do it correctly.

They are relying on specific hacks in the GCC compilers' backends in order for their rpmbuild back-end tools not to bust. That's lack of insight and lack of architecture: what if I were using Sun Studio compilers for Linux, or intel compilers, or PGI compilers? rpmbuild will bust. They didn't think it through, and they never do. It's so stereotypical of them: for the past 20 years they've been haphazardly hacking, and never learned from their mistakes on how to actually engineer systems and how to architect solutions. Just take a look at the hacks they perform in their .src.rpm's, and it's crystal clear.

And "-Wl,--build-id" work-around I had to pull was just one example. I have many.