My initial reaction to the Redhat EOL (end of life) announcement was that it was time to look at Suse or someone else for production Linux servers. Fortunately, the massive, vocal reaction from their users has Redhat searching for more acceptable solutions*.

I suggested extending up2date's "--src" flag to download, build and install from srpm packages instead of the prebuilt binary packages. In most cases, that would get around "major version number" incompatibilities. I know it's not as simple as that, but the existing rhn/up2date functions handle the majority of the work.

I believe RH heard loud and clear that 12 months of support is next to useless to serious users, and 36 months for AS (a possibility floated at the same time) wasn't appreciably better.

I think they'll opt to *not* lose the majority of their business customers. They've got the time, talent and motivation to come up with an acceptable solution.

As for Mandrake... Well, I wish them luck but it's not my problem. Maybe they'll get a government bailout ;-)

Surreal

* my assumptions are based largely on Jeremy Hogan's activity in the talkback forums on Newsforge.


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