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by pxc 636 days ago
> But if you start really taking advantage of the things which the distribution provides out of the box and recommends, especially around large-scale multi-system operation, you end up buying into the distibution's choices.

You mean management interfaces and repo mirroring stuff provided by the OS vendor, like cockpitd and Satellite and whatever?
1 comments
kbolino 636 days ago
Sure, that's part of it, if those tools are used. Daemons like the particular flavor of syslog and cron are also part of it. Patched kernels used to be more common, too. I listed a bunch of things that actually broke for me before in a sibling thread; sometimes it was down to e.g. the Python packages that were in EPEL vs. the Python packages that were actually being maintained by their original authors in PyPI, or various security tools configured around paths that changed, etc. There were usually workarounds or alternatives, but they were more difficult to set up than doing things the "native" way.
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pxc 636 days ago
I see! Thanks for referring to your sibling post, that definitely made clearer what you're talking about.

And yeah if you package stuff against, e.g., the Python libs included in the distro (or EPEL), you essentially need to maintain a repo as a downstream repo of the distro, then rebuild the whole repo with whatever subsequent release as a new upstream when it's time to upgrade. That kind of thing is doable but it's substantial integration work, and if it's aomething you do once a decade nobody is ever going to be fluent in it when it's time to be done.

I think I'd rather just maintain two repos— one against the latest stable release and one against the upstream rolling release (Fedora Rawhide, Debian Unstable, openSUSE Factory or Tumbleweed, etc.)— and upgrade every 6 months or whatever than leap the wider chasms between LTS releases.

And yeah the Python and Python libs shipped in a distro are generally there for the distro's integration purposes, which may involve different goals and constraints than app developers usually have. Building against whatever a distro ships with is not always the best way, as your painful migrations demonstrated.

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