Re: This was posted on Digg.com -- Linux Distribution blog/article

[Jeff Licquia <jeff@licquia.org>]

On Fri, 2005-12-09 at 14:09 -0500, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> What's left are the users, large and small, that have the time and
> resources.  They are typically large departments at an enterprise, or
> maybe a system integrator who caters to a significant, but still small,
> niche or set of niches.  Most "enterprise" distros will impede their
> needs for customization, leaving the more "rapidly changing" package
> distros or "ports."
> 
> They are the ones who maintain their own, _extensive_ testing and
> management procedures to rolling out "standard," tested, secured and
> well-managed solutions.  They take on that responsibility, because it's
> less load to provide that detail than to fight against the fixed
> configuration of the "enterprise" distros.

I'm not convinced such departments exist in any quantity.  Nor am I
convinced that even a majority of the few which do exist do what you
describe.

Sure, all departments should have QA in some form.  But I would be
surprised to learn that the QA for the ports-distro users is really all
that better than the QA for the package-distro users.  More likely, they
just have a hole in their QA, and they likely suffer for it.

(And if they don't, I argue that they could save IT budget money by
switching to a package-based distro, especially if they contract Progeny
to give it to them.)

Not that departments don't exist with the capabilities to do this, or
that organizations in general never test.  But building and maintaining
a distribution is hard work.  I don't see how it's possible to justify
the cost of that work unless you're one of a very small number of
organizations whose whole business derives from that kind of work.


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