[KLUG Members] Distributions and Package management

[members@kalamazoolinux.org]

>How are folks handling package management issues? 

A pretty sweeping question,  different people place different tasks under
"package management",  can you clarift?

>I am doing some reading, and see that Redhat is pretty poor about
>updating packages between major releases. 

Again, quite a broad statement.  They do fine by me,  all the core packages are
pretty current.  A "release" system will always lag somewhat behind,  but such
is the price of stability.  I often feel that RedHat is a tad aggressive, my
servers are pretty standard on 7.1.  I wouldn't put 7.3 on a server yet.

Non-core packages like Samba, etc... do lag behind.  But most largish site build
these independently anyway due to site constraints.  

>What distributions and package management techniques are folks using?

I manage all the core stuff via red-carpet, yep, thats a GUI.  But it lays out 
what dependencies are going to be very clearly, and with as a paid service it is
fast.  No getting carpel tunnell logging into a zillion ftp servers looking for
one stupid dependency.

Core stuff like bind, samba, and such we build from a standard spec file / src
rpm on the box where it will actually run.

A cron job dumps "rpm -qa" to my mailbox every month,  and I tuck the message
away just in case.  After any upgrade that requires building I just burn
/usr/src/redhat onto a CD and send it to the vault.

And don't mention Debion/apt-get,  I might as well subscribe to M$'s automatic
update service.  Ahhhh!