On Sat, 28 Jun 2014 16:54:34 +0200, you wrote: >Rapidly changing distros is mentioned in the response. What would classify >a rapidly changing distro.
Rapidly changing would be Fedora/Mint/Ubuntu with their 6 month release schedules, as opposed to Red Hat or the long term release version of Mint/Ubuntu, or Debian. The 6 month cycle is as short as you can get and still have any sort of realistic amount of testing. >Take ubuntu is there six month release cycle >quick enough and even then they still wont have the latest versions of >software. But they will have new enough versions of languages and libraries so that you can easily compile almost anything else (that is either not in the distribution, or not new enough). >New versions of software are being released daily and please correct if im >wrong but most distros do not release anything newer shortly there after >it coming out. Actually, in most cases there is about a 2 month prior to release cut off to allow for testing and bug fixing prior to release. But in most cases this is not an issue. The issue is with Red Hat or any other LTS type release where the languages (either compiler or interpreter) and libraries are several generations out of date. It comes down to what you want/need. There are parts of the software industry where you don't want change, once you get something working you want it kept that way. For these people Red Hat and its competitors are ideal, and they provide Red Hat with a very good revenue stream. For others they need newer compilers or libraries, so they need to put up with the short support lifecyles of a Fedora/Mint/Ubuntu in order to get those features (or luck into and freeze on a newly released Red Hat/LTS). Or, more likely in the HPC case, the people writing the software don't necessarily need the newer stuff but happen to be using it because what they do need is the newer features of the desktop environment (or hardware support for laptop/etc) and drag in a newer Perl/gcc/gfortran/etc. as a side effect of that need. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
