Re: pgbouncer-1.7.2-7.rhel6.x86_64.rpm fails to install on AMI

On Tue, Oct 17, 2017 at 9:11 PM, Daniel Farina <daniel(at)fdr(dot)io> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 17, 2017 at 11:49 AM Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net>
> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Oct 17, 2017 at 8:44 PM, Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> On 2017-10-17 19:39:00 +0100, Devrim Gündüz wrote:
>>> > We (community repo) don't support Amazon Linux anymore, because they
>>> stopped
>>> > being compatible with Red Hat.
>>>
>>> Given the amount of installations that seems like a fairly radical
>>> thing.
>>>
>>
>> Given that most of the other distros supported on Amazon are supported by
>> the repo, I don't see it as a big problem in general, TBH. In fact, I
>> seldom come across Amazon's own linux distro there anymore, most people
>> seem to be using either Ubuntu or CentOS...
>>
>
> I use it. It's the only way (I know of) to get Amazon to do support for
> kernel issues. Even as compared to Redhat, they will take a look at live
> crashed instances having problems...nobody else has that access. And as far
> as I know, they use it too, and perform quality assurance on it on their
> platform. Solution or workaround for that class of bugs is not particularly
> portable to other Linux distributions.
>
> In general, I have found Amazon Linux an easier target in most respects:
> one can drop workarounds to cope with the ancientness of CentOS6. Notably,
> access to new libraries (e.g. libcurl) allow easier updates to libraries
> like gdal or geos with fewer patches to cope with old compilers (by
> installing gcc64-c++). It also tends to have new kernels that are lightly
> modified to deal with specific issues (per changelog).
>
> Amazon Linux however, different, and makes releases that move rather
> quickly. It's rather closer to Fedora in a way.
>
> Sometimes, as with programming languages, they are fairly fastidious at
> separating out old versions of packages (e.g. pip-3.4, pip-3.5, pip-3.6 for
> Python), and for better or worse, sometimes, in cases like gcc, libevent,
> libcurl, or boost, they'll Just Upgrade.
>
>
I guess our experiences are different. I've never had the need for kernel
level bugs on such instances. I have had countless of customers had their
stuff broken by random incompatible upgrades pushed out in a way that even
Fedora wouldn't do. Those problems all went away when people stopped using
Amazon Linux.

(And of course, a good way to get around the ancientness of centos 6 is to
use centos 7)

Anyway. A fast moving distro with large number of backwards incompatible
changes is obviously a huge hassle for the people maintaining the RPMs. I
can't really fault them for not dealing with that, since it's on volunteer
basis. Might be selection bias that makes them not exposed to the userbase.

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: https://www.hagander.net/ <http://www.hagander.net/>
Work: https://www.redpill-linpro.com/ <http://www.redpill-linpro.com/>