[Catalyst] Re: Ubuntu / Catalyst

Wade.Stuart at fallon.com Wade.Stuart at fallon.com
Wed Nov 14 15:39:38 GMT 2007


> On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 11:16:54AM +0000, Richard Jones wrote:
> > Peter Edwards wrote:
> > >Centos 5 == Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
> > >For production quality, you can expect it to be pretty stable and I
have
> > >corporate customers running it successfully. It's one of our
development
> > >platforms.
> > >However, note mst's comments about the broken Perl on it. I found that

> > >quite
> > >shocking considering it's supposed to be a premier Linux hosting
platform.
> > >As usual, compiling your own perl and Apache and providing your own
> > >PERL5LIB
> > >dir per live application area is a sane way of going about delivering
> > >standardised live applications you can roll out and support.
> > >
> >
> > Possibly a bit OT now, but as I'm about to set up another production
> > server and was going to use CentOS 5, I'm a bit concerned. Matt
> > mentioned fstab and init, but not as far as I can see Perl - in what
way
> > is Perl broken on CentOS 5?
>
> That's because I was bitching about later Ubuntus, not Dead Rat.
>
> I simply don't consider RH distros a deployment platform you'd choose
unless
> mandated to use them, and prefer to build my own perl if I have to.
>
> CentOS 5's vendor perl will show a 2* performance hit due to their
inability
> to maintain a perl package.
>
> Just Don't.

      While I mostly agree with Matt's take on unix/linux issues -- I will
give my support to Cent/RH here.  It is true,  they have had some missteps
with perl in the past.  Those tend get resolved fairly quickly. The perl
speed issue listed above is fixed in current patches. RH/Cent has some very
undeniable advantages over ubuntu/suse/flavor of the day.  Some advantages
likely to make a difference in corporations are tight partnerships with
dell and other server vendors (read tightly coupled hardware support and
updates), tight relationships with commercial software vendors (pick 5
software packages that run on linux from different vendors chances are the
common supported platform will be RH and therefore CentOS). It is also not
uncommon to build your own kit for webserver/perl/mysql etc for production
servers no matter what distro you choose -- and run that in parallel to the
distro's build. It makes sense to control the bits that run your
applications.

      In general,  when it comes to linux distros, my belief is that issues
you have with distros can generally be pinpointed down to the administrator
(myself included).  I have used all of the big 6 Linux distros and found
things I like and dislike about all of them.  They are all acceptable for
hosting perl web apps.

-Wade






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