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From: Rahul on 28 Jan 2010 14:38
J G Miller <miller(a)yoyo.ORG> wrote in news:1264693989_41(a)vo.lu:

> Just because a distribution is more popular eg has been downloaded by
> more people at one particular time in no way gives any indication how
> bug free is that distribution.

True. That's why I said "all other things being equal". The more the people
that use it the more likely a bug gets reported though. Maybe for fixes the
size of the distro-developer core is the relevant stat. But this is also
hard to estimate.

> What you need to do is to look at the bug reporting systems put in
> place for each distribution and how well the maintainers respond to
> fixing those bugs.

I tried. But it's hard for me to make a judgement based on the bugzilla
trails etc. Also, if more bugs were reported does that mean a system was
more buggy or that more people used it so more bugs were found. I'd rather
have a known bug than an unknown one.





--
Rahul
From: J G Miller on 28 Jan 2010 15:46
On Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:38:55 +0000, Rahul wrote:

> I'd rather have a known bug than an unknown one.

Yes the real problem is not the known unknowns but the unknown unknowns,
to paraphrase the famous line from former Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld.

“ There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now
know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns.
These are things we do not know we don't know. ”

The question is though, what is the advantage for you of using
ScientificLinux over CentOS.

If you are based at CERN or FermiLabs (or work in association with them)
then it should be your first choice, otherwise I do not see the advantage
to you of using it over CentOS, and possibly a disadvantage.

QUOTE

a Linux release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs
and universities around the world. Its primary purpose is to reduce
duplicated effort of the labs, and to have a common install base for
the various experimenters.

The base SL distribution is basically Enterprise Linux, recompiled from
source.

Our main goal for the base distribution is to have everything
compatible with Enterprise, with only a few minor additions or changes.

An example of of items that were added are Pine, and OpenAFS.

UNQUOTE

So do you need Pine or OpenAFS, and if so, are these available with
CentOS?

If you want the availability of thousands more software packages than
CentOS offers, you really should consider a Debian based distribution.

From the Wikipedia GNU/Linux distribution comparison page

CentOS packages : 1 660

Debian packages : 25 113

Numbers are of course approximate, but you can see the order of magnitude
difference in software package availability.
From: Rahul on 29 Jan 2010 11:36
J G Miller <miller(a)yoyo.ORG> wrote in news:1264711583_63(a)vo.lu:

> If you want the availability of thousands more software packages than
> CentOS offers, you really should consider a Debian based distribution.
>
>

I need stability. Number of packages not so much.

But, yes, argument's strongly in favor of CentOS. We are doing that.

--
Rahul
From: Bob Tennent on 29 Jan 2010 13:22
On Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:36:31 +0000 (UTC), Rahul wrote:
>
> I need stability. Number of packages not so much.
>
> But, yes, argument's strongly in favor of CentOS. We are doing that.

Stability is determined primarily by the decisions made years ago by Red
Hat. When an update is necessary is also determined primarily by Red
Hat. Where CentOS and ScientificLinux might differ is in how quickly
updates are made available to their users.

Bob T.
From: General Schvantzkoph on 29 Jan 2010 17:11
On Thu, 28 Jan 2010 07:54:50 +0000, Rahul wrote:

> Are there any studies / websites that track the total user base of
> various Linux distros? I wanted to install CentOS on a Server but some
> others like ScientificLinux. In "theory" they are both the same since
> RHEL clones....
>
> But I am always biased towards a distro or software or tool with more
> users than less (all other things being equal). Just makes more likely
> that bugs have been ironed out. And google searhing is easier. Your
> problem is rarely unque.
>
> In order to make a better judgement I wanted to compare the CentOS
> versus ScientificLinux userbase sizes but google doesn't throw up much.

CentOS is better known, Scientific Linux has deeper pocket backers (i.e.
the particle accelerator labs in the US and Europe). As you've noted they
are built from the same Redhat source RPMs and you can use the same third
party repositories like EPEL and karan so for all practical purposes they
are the same. RHEL is really stable so don't need to worry about the
speed with which updates are released. If either distro were to bite the
dust you could switch to the other trivially. I use CentOS on my servers.

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