Develop against the versions in the Yum repositories!

 

I saw a tweet by Simon Haslam at the weekend that read,

“I’m v surprised to read that @Atlassian Stash needs newer git than in the latest RHEL/OL6 repos!”

I had a similar experience at the weekend too, but this time with Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) 3.0 EA. According to the documentation, it requires the following version of Tomcat.

“Apache Tomcat Release 7.0.56 or later”

So let’s have a look at what is typically available from the Yum repositories at the time of writing.

  • RHEL6/OL6 : tomcat6-6.0.24-80.el6.x86_64.rpm
  • EPEL 6 : tomcat-7.0.33-4.el6.noarch.rpm
  • RHEL7/OL7 : tomcat-7.0.42-8.el7_0.noarch.rpm

Realistically, nobody is moving to RHEL7/OL7 for Oracle products yet, since the only database version certified is Oracle 12c (12.1.0.2 onward), so the vast majority of kit out there will be running RHEL6/OL6. With that in mind, the requirement for “Apache Tomcat Release 7.0.56 or later” represents a bit of a support nightmare. As soon as people require a piece of software on a server that is not available from a default (or similar) Yum repository, the product is outside the typical sys admin patching cycle and someone has to make a specific effort to keep the custom installation up to date. You know what that means right? Yeah, it never gets patched… It’s not that installing this stuff is difficult. It’s just the impact it has on sys admin teams that is the problem.

We all want to use the latest and greatest, but there seems to be a disconnect between what the developers do and what is reasonably supportable out here in the real world. Developing stuff against product versions that are not in Yum repos is a mistake IMHO.

I’m going to play around with ORDS on older versions of Tomcat to see what happens…

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

4 thoughts on “Develop against the versions in the Yum repositories!”

  1. You might be OK installing Tomcat separately from a tarball Tim as I suspect it only depends on the JVM. Then you have an independent Tomcat just for ORDS – not ideal, but manageable.

    The problem for me was that I was trying to install Stash on a build server alongside Jenkins, JIRA, XE and other products – I didn’t fancy the prospect of having to try to fix other stuff if I used non-standard RPMs (e.g. from rpmforge).

    As @stefansaasen has tweeted though the version of git in the RHEL 6 repo is 4 years old, but from a sysadmin perspective I want things to be simple and supported.

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