There are lots of exciting things happening in the CentOS ecosystem at the moment, by which I mean "upstream" or "across stream" in Fedora and RHEL. I'm thinking of projects that equip RH-like EL in general for serious entry into the enterprise, things like the Fedora Directory Server, and RedHat's Emerging Technologies projects such as Cobbler, FreeIPA and Ovirt. Also JBoss middleware. Will these sort of packages end up in CentOS eventually, or are there any major problems installing EPEL packages on CentOS? I know CentOS is very popular in the web hosting world, but enterprise grade directory servers, provisioning servers and virtualisation technologies could also see greater take up of CentOS in areas like local government and education for example (medium sized but slightly cash-challenged organisations). I suppose this is some kind of roadmap question, or a question about using EPEL packages on CentOS. Personally, I'm interested in using these "emerging technologies" in the local government environment.
> There are lots of exciting things happening in the CentOS ecosystem at > the moment, by which I mean "upstream" or "across stream" in Fedora > and RHEL. > > I'm thinking of projects that equip RH-like EL in general for serious > entry into the enterprise, things like the Fedora Directory Server, > and RedHat's Emerging Technologies projects such as Cobbler, FreeIPA > and Ovirt. Also JBoss middleware. > > Will these sort of packages end up in CentOS eventually, or are there > any major problems installing EPEL packages on CentOS? > > I know CentOS is very popular in the web hosting world, but enterprise > grade directory servers, provisioning servers and virtualisation > technologies could also see greater take up of CentOS in areas like > local government and education for example (medium sized but slightly > cash-challenged organisations). > > I suppose this is some kind of roadmap question, or a question about > using EPEL packages on CentOS. Personally, I'm interested in using > these "emerging technologies" in the local government environment. >personally i already use epel in CentOS and have had no issues - specifically i use this for cobbler/koan
admin wrote:> I'm thinking of projects that equip RH-like EL in general for serious > entry into the enterprise, things like the Fedora Directory Server, and > RedHat's Emerging Technologies projects such as Cobbler, FreeIPA and > Ovirt. Also JBoss middleware.A lot ( if not all ) of these are going to be in CentOS soon, in a lot of cases we hope they are better integrated into the CentOS ecosystem being in the CentOS Repo's - eg the CentOS DirServer has been in the testing repo for a bit, and the same with cobbler/koan/func/smolt/maatkit etc. What we are ( inside the CentOS Team ) hoping to achieve is a good mix of people contributing to both the Enterprise Users ( and they are such users themselves ) and to specific industry segments where CentOS has been popular ( eg. the Virt SIG ). And since its CentOS, we focus on the Enterprise Stream of products as much as possible, and even go directly upstream in cases where we need to ( eg. Mysql in CentOS4/5 is the Enterprise Release from mysql, not the community release that Fedora and RHEL build with ). That then opens more doors for support options for people who use these builds and we hope improves and creates options for people who self-support. And we do consider the self-support users to be the core of what is CentOS today and the community around it- like this mailing list, the forums, the irc regulars etc. If you truly look at the entire setup ( eg. the php5.2 conversation recently, the fact that CentOS DirServer is around, that an IcedTea varient has been in CentOS already - the availability of DRBD for years out of the stock repo's ), its quite a well formed out ecosystem ( in your words), and one that we would like to promote and build further. When I say 'we', I hope to include all the users and abusers of CentOS :D - Maybe some of them will agree! - KB