[clug] RHEL - Options for a dev environment? [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Darryl Luff]

Roppola, Antti - BRS wrote:

Hi Antti,

> Hi all,
>  
> We're going to be moving our web applications environment to RHEL.
>   
...

> RedHat Desktop (workstation option)
> A lot cheaper than RHEL and thus more palatable for many developer
> instances that RHEL itself. Should
> be a close match for RHEL as far as libc and the like are concerned. The
> workstation edition appears to
> come with Apache and the like (less clear on what is *not* included).
> While it costs (per system), the price
> isn't too bad and we get some level of support and updates.
>  
> Centos
> On paper, it should be a good match for RHEL. Is free, but we'd not have
> any support options (not that
> we've really ever needed them for sandbox systems in the past). I'd
> assume the updates would be a good
> match for RHEL too.
>   
I think you've chosen from these two yourself. If you're not going to 
get any value from the support, why not go the free option?

Doing development on the server OS (or close) helps with testing, but 
there is a danger of becoming too tied to vendor-specific features and 
configurations, which could limit your flexibility to move if the 
current OS isn't suiting your purposes.

Current build tools should let you create software that can configure 
itself to run on many different unix-like platforms. Using a development 
platform that is different to the deployment platform is a good way to 
ensure you're using generic, more portable OS features. Then if you ever 
do decide to move your servers to Suse or Debian or whatever, the 
software has more chance of being able to handle it without needing changes.

So I don't think the devel platform is critical. It is of course 
critical to do pre-release testing on systems configured as closely as 
possible to the live servers.


Darryl Luff