[Discuss] Oracle Linux, going after CentOs

[Chuck Anderson]

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 01:47:23PM -0400, Richard Pieri wrote:
> On 7/23/2012 1:07 PM, Guy Gold wrote:
> >They don't really leave much room for questions :)
> 
> Just two.  For now.
> 
> 1. Do you want to give Oracle the market share? :)
> 
> 2. How badly does it break Scientific Linux?  CentOS and Oracle
> Linux aim for binary compatibility with RHEL.  SL does not, and
> mixing EL packages with SL causes conflicts.

>From www.scientificlinux.org:

"The base SL distribution is basically Enterprise Linux, recompiled
from source.

Our main goal for the base distribution is to have everything
compatible with Enterprise, with only a few minor additions or
changes. Examples of items that were added are Alpine, and OpenAFS."

I'm not sure what you mean by mixing EL packages with SL packages--why
would you mix RHEL, CentOS, and SL packages on the same system?  Or do
you mean third party software?

CentOS and SL are both designed to be compatible with RHEL.  And they
both do a pretty good job, but there can always be unexpected issues.
See this one on CentOS for example:

http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2011-November/119250.html