<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=iso-8859-1"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>On Aug 3, 2013, at 1:36 AM, Richard Houser <<a href="mailto:rick@divinesymphony.net">rick@divinesymphony.net</a>> wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite"><p dir="ltr" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; ">With RHEL, I run into lots of snags and occasionally security vulnerabilities due to outdates libraries (after accounting for back ports). It's really more of a host for badly built commercial software that misuses dynamic libraries, since Linux already has a stable API since 1.0. Applications that require specific libraries are expected to statically link or ship those libraries. If you run modern code, stick to a distro built on a current codebase.</p></blockquote></div><div>I'm unfamiliar with these security vulnerabilities that Richard speaks of, so I can't address them, other than the point of paying for a RHEL subscription is that if you were to point out a security vulnerability like he mentioned, it would be fixed and you'd have a support team helping you with it. </div><div><br></div><div>Sadly, not everything can be solved by statically linked binaries, and there really isn't much of a "stable API" in a rolling release distro. It's fine if all you care about is packaged in the distro and your projects have very short lifetimes, but if you have a user base that expects all their workstations and computational nodes to have a stable target for compilation, then you'll really want an enterprise distribution. </div><div><br></div><div apple-content-edited="true"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><div>--</div><div>Jonathan Billings <<a href="mailto:billings@negate.org">billings@negate.org</a>></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span>
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