Axel Thimm (Axel.Thimm(a)ATrpms.net) said:
And I only mentioned that the Linux part is homogeneous. Ever
wondered
why the majority of Unix admins that have skills in managing
heterogeneous Unix system have a physicist's background? It is far
more important to have a good mips/$ and some scientists on salary,
than to spend all budget for the IT staff's system management.
If you are spending all the budget for IT staff to do system management,
you're doing it wrong; there's no reason that systems management should
be on the par you're talking about. There are places that run hundreds
to thousands of machines with a single administrator. Honestly? It sounds
like a vicious cycle of "we don't think we have the time to set up
a consistent platform, so we don't, so we have to spend too much time
managing it, so we don't have the time to set up a new platform..."
> If you want consistent results, run a consistent platform.
So you outrule Fedora? Because consistent means even more than a
stable API/ABI, RHEL comes close to that, but switching to RHEL
because a distro does not want to offer static libs is not reason
enough, especially in light of development of key components like
gfortran that is reflected in RHEL only a couple years after it makes
it into the non-enterprise platforms.
RHEL doesn't even *ship* this scientific stuff, for a large part.
All I'm saying is that we shouldn't continue to support this sort of
fundamentally-unsupportable setup ad nauseam - it's time to think about
how to solve this in a sane manner, rather than continuing to paper
over the problem. I don't see how, at a minium, moving the static
libraries to -static packages changes things - if, as you say, everyone
just chucks libraries manually in /usr/local, then how is this making
anything worse for them?
Bill