[Discuss] Interesting linux date bug

[John Blomfield]

Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> On 2008-03-04 10:14-0800 pw wrote:
>
>> My version of Centos.
>>
>> Linux version 2.6.9-42.ELsmp (buildcentos at build-i386) (gcc version 
>> 3.4.6 20060404 (Red Hat 3.4.6-3)) #1 SMP Sat Aug 12 09:39:11 CDT 2006
>
> I think this is a perfect example of one issue with enterprise operating
> systems.  RedHat has to do an awful lot of work to backport bug fixes 
> to the
> _really_ old kernel 2.6.9, and it appears they missed one here (which I
> assume the CentOS clone of RedHat simply copied).  Of course, from the 
> great
> market success of RedHat enterprise editions and the CentOS clones of 
> those,
> they are filling a strong market demand for an "unchanging" OS, but
> computers (and especially Linux computers) are not toasters. Thus, I 
> think
> it is stupid for businesses to demand unchanging computer software 
> because
> (a) that ignores all the value being constantly added to non-enterprise
> Linux distributions including fixes to bugs such as the one that started
> this thread, and (b) makes the transition to the next version of the 
> Linux
> enterprise OS extremely expensive for the vendor (just to support old
> versions that nobody else is interested in any more) and also the 
> business
> in terms of needed staff training for the abrupt transition, etc.  
> RedHat is
> doing quite well now, but in the long-term I think businesses are 
> going to
> get a whole lot smarter about extracting the best value from the 
> world-wide
> efforts that improve the Linux kernel and huge amount of surrounding
> software.  For RedHat's sake I hope they encourage that change in 
> business
> thinking rather than having to play catch up when business's realize what
> they are currently missing by demanding "enterprise" software which is
> supposed to remain essentially unchanged for many years.
>
> Getting back to Peters' date bug, it looks like he does need to 
> upgrade to
> the next CentOS enterprise edition (assuming that exists) to fix this bug
> (and probably many others).  Alternatively, he could try a non-enterprise
> distro.  I could mention Ubuntu here, but I won't because that is much
> too obvious.... :-)
>
As I reported earlier there is no problem with Fedora 8 (Redhat's test 
bed). It does not have this particular bug so there is no need for such 
drastic treatment as Ub...... what was the name of that distro again?  
Fedora  updates stream into my computer on a daily basis.  I do take the 
point however about static editions!  The benefit of switching to Fedora 
is that all the familiar Redhat tools and utilities would still be 
available to the CentOS user.

John
> Alan
> __________________________
> Alan W. Irwin
>
> Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and 
> Astronomy,
> University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).
>
> Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state 
> implementation
> for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting 
> software
> package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the 
> Loads of
> Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
> (lbproject.sf.net).
> __________________________
>
> Linux-powered Science
> __________________________
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