Re: What Linux edition we should chose?

On 06/01/2010 03:34 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Ivan Sergio Borgonovo <mail@webthatworks.it> writes:
>> On Mon, 31 May 2010 08:47:25 -0600
>> Scott Marlowe <scott.marlowe@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Pgsql is pretty easy to build from source.
> 
>> Yeah it is. But what is it going to be an upgrade process? On a
>> production box?
> 
> If it makes you feel better, build your own RPMs (or
> $package-style-of-choice).  This is actually a pretty good idea if you
> are on a package-manager-based platform, as it makes it far simpler to
> keep track of exactly what you've got installed.  It's generally not
> hard to take the source package supplied by your distro and stick a
> new minor-release source tarball into it.

Amen.  We do this for anything not supplied with RHEL, although our
first trip is usually a quick look at the EPEL repos to see if they have
a suitable build we can use.

As an aside, though, I personally gave up the gotta-have-the-latest
treadmill some time ago.  There's a lot to be said for letting a
distribution engineering team spend the time and effort tracking
security fixes and suchlike.

(And to answer the original question, I'd use RHEL or CentOS; but these
things tend to devolve into a simple way of exposing the distro
prejudices of the responders)