Forum OpenACS Development: Re: New linux distribution to replace defunct RedHat consumer?

Do we need to pick one distribution?  I can see value in having a 'main' distribution which we can point new and distro agnostic users to as well as encourage maintenance effort for one distro...  but I would have thought it would be beneficial to have a place on openacs.org for installation docs on any distro anyone wants to support.  I'm assuming this decision isn't going to stop openacs from installing on alternatives.

I've been running Gentoo for a while and I think it's a great distro.  The ebuild packages Chris Johnson put together work well and encouraged me to do some work on them myself.  Currently I plan to keep maintaining them (and an openacs ebuild if Chris doesn't beat me to it), so it would be nice if there was a place on openacs.org for some docs and links even if Gentoo isn't the communities first choice.

On the Beowulf list, Robert G. Brown (who definitely knows what he's talking about) reports that Fedora's stock configuration will use Yum (functionally equivalent to Debian's apt-get) extensively. This is a Good Thing, and should be better than up2date was anyway. As far as how Fedora goes overall, we'll have to wait and see.

Lee, picking one "blesses" OpenACS Linux distribution? That might be nice, but could we ever actually agree on one? I doubt it. :)

More practical might be to have a FAQ answer including some sort of survey results saying "Experienced OpenACS users typically use:" and then break down the results by OS distribution (Read Hat, Debian, FreeBSD, Solaris, etc.) I think that would give the new OpenACS user most of what he wants to know. We've already had several informal suveys of that sort from all the Forums threads on Linux distribution X vs. Y, after all...