Re: Long-term Stability Distros (was Re: [tlug] Flash and Firexfox 2)

[Edward Middleton <emiddleton@example.com>]

Josh Glover wrote:
> 2009/3/13 Edward Middleton <emiddleton@example.com>:
> 
> I've actually found the humans on the Red Hat support line to be
> awesome. They are technically savvy, and they will actually get an
> engineer on the phone whilst you hold the line if you a) call during
> America/Boston daytime, b) have a serious problem that requires an
> engineer to troubleshoot it, and c) work for a company like Amazon,
> who I have to assume is one of Red Hat's biggest customers.
> 
> I don't even know if (c) is a hard requirement, because I made one
> support call to Red Hat for RHAS at my last job, and we held all of
> three RHAS licences at the time. The issue was with a nasty POSIX
> threads deadlock, and they got an engineer with deep knowledge of
> glibc to call me back within an hour of my initial call. The bug
> turned out to be in my userland code (of course), but the engineer
> helped me troubleshoot the issue for at least 20 minutes, and when it
> turned out to be my bug, he was totally not a dick about it. I think
> his words were, "this is my job, and your problem was an interesting
> one that I haven't seen before".

That is a more interesting data point.  Though I don't know the
criticism was all that unfair.  Didn't Oracle started their own Linux
distribution because of customer complaints resulting from being ping
ponged between Oracle and RHEL support?  I remember reading a "why we
quit Linux" article citing this as a primary reason they stopped using
Linux[1].  The example they quoted was RHEL releasing a compulsory
upgrade that wasn't tested/broke the Oracle database.  Maybe things have
changed.

Edward

1. Of course I can't find it now ;)