Over the past week, my boss and I have had discussions about the niche left by RedHat, and the possibility of working on a distribution/sub-project aimed at enterprise folks. The plan is to target those RedHat users and companies who are unwilling (or unable) to pay for RedHat Enterprise Linux, but need HA features. Our company falls into this category, but made the RedHat->Debian switch earlier on.
Currently, we're forced to maintain our own kernels, compile apache/php from source, and use a few backports to woody. What we really need is: * a kernel that supports things like IPVS (Linux Virtual Server), UML (the skas host patch), 64-bit smbfs support, and various other things. RedHat's kernel had a slew of 2.6 backports, as well as HA stuff thrown in there. We need something like that (only less extreme; RH liked their experimental kernel features a bit too much). * Updated server-related packages; for example, we definitely need a php4 package newer than 4.1.2, and preferably built against apache2. I can think of a few ways to offer the above. The first is a standalone distribution, based on debian but with various enhancements (not a novel idea, by any means). We could either base this on testing, doing snapshot releases every 3-6 months, and offering security fixes, or on stable w/ various backports. We would probably have a stripped-down installer based on d-i, w/ the stock kernel being similar to redhat's kernel. Another way would be to have a debian sub-project; this would have a kernel that includes extra (enterprise) features (kernel-image-2.4.22-enterprise-1-686smp), amongst other things. I'd also like to see enhancements to d-i, work done to ease things like php into testing, and (if based around testing) security updates for testing. If folks are at all interested in this sort of thing, please let me know. Our long-term goals for this are to hire a developer or two (part or full time) to help maintain this project, as long as it's something we (and our clients) can use and support. Suggestions are most welcome.
