Re: Re: Red Hat to support PostgreSQL - Mailing list pgsql-general

My last two cents on the issue. We should really drop it now, AFAIK, I
have no reason to bash RedHat, nor defend any other OS's. People make
their own decisions. I'll be happy to take this offline if someone wishes
to further discuss the pros and cons of any Linux distribution.

> > 3) So much extra crap running to begin with, eating up extra memory, cpu,
> > etc. (Yeah, sure you can spend time securing and setting up the box to not
> > run what it shouldn't be... _OR_ you can save that wasted time (it adds up
> > when you are setting up 30 production machines) and run a quality
> > distribution like Debian or even Slackware)
>
>     I'm just sticking these together because they are really the same issue,
> and an administrative one, not engineering.
>
>     You can set up your machines however you wish.  While I generally prefer
> Debian for standalone systems because dselect makes it easy to add and remove
> things without spending a lot of time looking for other files, I've found that
> recent Red Hat is very manageable, especially if you are building a custom
> installation or your own .rpm files.
>
>     It all boils down to how much time you want to spend dealing with your
> installation and how custom you want it.  For a moderate fee, I'll build you a
> Red Hat kickstart CD that includes exactly what you want and doesn't start so
> much stuff "out of the box".  For a lesser fee I'll tell you how.  For free,
> you can learn.  Yes, the default install puts a lot of crap most people don't
> want on the system.  Defaults are typically not production settings.

Bravo. That's all very true. As for the last statement about defaults...
Ofcourse. You always have to tune a machine for production use, however,
things like having to disable "lpd" are certainly wasted time. Or
"portmapper"... Jesus... That shouldn't be running unless you _need_ it.
If you _really_ want, you can setup a Debian footprint system that only
takes up 50mb... Let's see a RedHat installation do that.

>
> > 2) Most commercial software made _for_ RedHat (some companies only
> > "support" RedHat) insist that you use RPM to install their software,
> > otherwise you are SOL. Most commercial software made _for_ _Linux_
> > supports all distributions.
>
>     So?

So? I'd consider using RedHat again if a few things were changed... One of
which was that I _didn't_ have to use RPMs. When a software vendor creates
RPMs only, it's rather disturbing. Apparently, from my own observations,
I've noticed that commercial vendors who write software for RedHat, tend
to only release RPM packages, where as vendors who write for any other
distro or Linux in general, tend to use something more universal (tar for
example).

> [Note: this is going to be my only comment on the subject of distributions, since
> it is even further away from the scope of this list then the support of
> PostgreSQL by Red Hat]

I'm done.