[OpenAFS] Upgrade from 1.2.8 to 1.4.7

[Simon Wilkinson]

On 27 Jul 2008, at 14:03, Jeffrey Altman wrote:

> Why Fedora Core?  The upgrade rate of the kernels is really high and
> it is impossible for the OpenAFS community to keep up with them.

In general, we manage to make new kernel modules available for both  
Fedora and RHEL kernels within about 48 hours of the kernels  
appearing on the relevant mirrors. There are still human steps in  
this process, so on occasion things take longer depending on the  
availability of effort. The same process builds both Fedora and RHEL  
kernels, so the latency is pretty much the same.

However, the same considerations apply to running OpenAFS on Fedora  
Core as they do to running any application on such a fast moving,  
bleeding edge, distribution. Fedora have, in the past, produced  
updates that break applications. OpenAFS's reliance on the stability  
of the kernel API makes it particularly vulnerable to these kinds of  
changes. If you intend on using Fedora as part of a production  
system, you commit yourself to doing a significant amount of local QA  
on every set of updates that appear upstream before you roll them out  
to your systems.

My organisation historically used Fedora as the basis of its entire  
Linux infrastructure (about 1000 hosts). We've now almost completely  
moved over to Scientific Linux (a RHEL clone), in an effort to reduce  
the manpower required.

Simon.