[Asterisk-Users] Fedora Core 3 or Fedora Core 4? yum update ornot?

[Paul]

Ryan Amos wrote:

>This is turning into a sysadmin theory flamewar, but I think the main
>point is that Fedora probably isn't the best thing to run on production
>machines for QA reasons. This is because Fedora is more or less the QA
>testbed for RHEL. CentOS is, for all intents and purposes (except a
>little bug I discovered with large block devices >2 TB) the same as RHEL
>without the support contract, so it is probably a better choice for a
>server you want to keep working for a while.
>
>Debian stable would probably work just as well (though IMO debian tends
>to be a bit TOO old,) as would SUSE's stable release version. Just don't
>use a "testing" release on a production machine. "yum update" (or
>up2date, or apt) is pretty safe on "stable" release trees, but in the
>testing releases you can run into problems with package dependencies,
>versions, slowly updated mirrors... you get the point.
>
>  
>
Debian stable is not so old. No decent distro is going to do a new
stable release every time a new asterisk, openoffice, firefox, etc. is
released. That's why they call it stable.

There are several ways to get newer asterisk versions onto a debian
stable system. The end user decides what risks to take in modifying any
stable distro. Best approach for me has been to limit those changes to
what I really must have. I take something like a new openoffice and try
it out on a debian system running testing or unstable. If I like it
enough, I find or build debian packages for the stable release. I think
this sane and careful approach works with most linux distros but I have
seen some distros where the testing or unstable branch was not
installable at times.