kernel vs. Debian/Red Hat/SuSE e.t.c.?

[Robert Wilson]

Hi,

Due to budget reasons, we went with Debian about five years ago and I have 
been fairly happy. I've had one problem with a Realtek driver but it was 
straight forward to find and fix the source code. My bugreport and fix was 
accepted and incorporated into the kernel pool. But lately, I'm having to 
help some Red Hat based folks and it hasn't been easy.

My current kernel is 2.6.20-7 and I see 2.6.21 has just been released. I'll 
have 2.6.21 built and tested in probably a couple of days. But I get the 
impression that Red Hat is a further back and have no idea of the other 
common Linux packages.

I'm not out to start a "package war" but is it correct that Red Hat tends to 
be some significant number of releases behind the current kernel development 
effort?

I noticed that Red Hat network configuration is tied to 
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts whereas Debian and the kernel.org uses 
/etc/network for IP addresses. This suggests the kernel needs a lot of 
patches to maintain compatibility and there may be a large 'patch rpm' 
needed to adapt the Linus kernel to Red Hat. Did I miss something here?

I really want to help the folks but if they are tied to Red Hat and can't 
move to something I can help them with, I may have to walk away from helping 
them.

Thanks,
Bob Wilson

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