Re: [Evolution] Public Folder Hierarchy

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

> > Thanks Milan.  I only have centos systems at this point.
> >
> > If I have time to build a new system, I will give out a try.  Not sure if I could put an rpm from fedora 
> > on to a cent os system.
> > Mike
> >
> > From mobile
>
>
> Hi :)
> I thought CentOS made a point of being a free version of RedHat, which
> uses rpm (stands for RedHat Package Management)? 

RedHat is a company.  It essentially creates two types of Linux
operating system - RedHat Enterprise Linux (aka RHEL) which it supports
via a subscription service and Fedora which is a community supported
system.  Because of the GPL license, both operating systems are free (as
in zero cost).  Fedora is distributed as a freely available binary
system;  RHEL is available as source code. (RHEL is available as a
binary system to those who pay for support.)

CentOS takes the freely available source of RHEL, removes any copyright
material, compiles it and makes it available as a binary distribution.
CentOS isn't the only group to do this - most notably Scientific Linux
does a very similar thing, except that CentOS's aim is to be as close as
possible to RHEL, whereas SL make some changes to the packages. 


>  Also isn't Fedora a testing ground for packages to see if they work
> well enough "out in the wild", in an active distro, before being
> considered for the RedHat repos? 

Sort of.  Each major version of RHEL is based on a Fedora release, but
once released, there is no link between RHEL and Fedora - it's not as if
Fedora packages are trickled down to RHEL over time.  The primary aim of
RHEL is stability, and as part of that the major version of the packages
very rarely change - RHEL 5 had Evolution 2.12.x when it started out,
and it still does now; RHEL 6 has Evolution 2.28.x and probably will do
until its end of life.  For unmaintained versions of packages, RedHat
will backport bug fixes from later releases if appropriate. 

>  Do RedHat pay some of their devs to work on Fedora to compliment the
> volunteers and others that work on the Fedora project?

Yes, RedHat developers work on all aspects of their operating systems.
RedHat is also the biggest single contributor to kernel development and
patches.

> I think even if this is all true then it's still not completely
> certain because it's quite likely that things get recompiled or
> repackaged before going into the main distro and even then there is a
> chance of some dependancy issue.  

It is virtually certain that an F17 RPM of Evo 3.4.4 will not install on
CentOS 6.  There are too many dependencies on Gnome 3.x packages, which,
if satisfied, would leave the system deader than a dead thing.  If you
do, by some miracle, manage to satisfy all the dependencies, then you
would probably end up with an F17 system anyway!

If the later versions of Evo do indeed solve the problem, then it's
possible that RedHat would backport the changes to 2.28.x, but since you
don't pay for support if you use CentOS, they aren't likely to take the
request seriously, and even if they did, it would be classed as an
enhancement, not a bug fix, so would be very low priority.

P.