*nix OS that is easy to update to latest software
I need to configure a server (*nix) that runs our (bespoke) CMS and Applications.
In the past I have defaulted to using Cent OS 5, but I find this outdated difficult to upgrade the software to the versions we require.
For example, we need PHP 5.3, but CentOS 5 has 5.2. Updating is fine but breaks something else (normally MySQL support in PHP).
Eventually it will get to a situation where I can't upgrade because of missing dependancies and incompatible versions.
Error: Missing Dependency: httpd = 2.2.3-43.el5.centos.3 is needed by package httpd-devel-2.2.3-43.el5.centos.3.i386 (updates)
Is there a better alternative OS for hassle free updates, I need:
- Apache 2.2.17 (the development version for apxs)
- MySQL 5.5.8
- PHP 5.3.5
All stable enterprise distros will suffer from this to some extent: in order to know that they're deploying a reliable combination of packages, vendors will avoid rolling out the latest and greatest until it's had a chance to be tested both by the vendor and the public.
Our solution to this has been to maintain our own private YUM repository of packages we compiled ourselves to meet our own requirements; this allows you to be reasonable about dependencies and still provides reasonable simplicity (no need to recompile every time) for new deployments of your standard packages.
I would caution against running a distro like Fedora for production: it is very clearly, in its own estimation, an option that sacrifices enterprise-class reliability for the latest-'n-greatest package set.
Hope these suggestions are helpful!
Personal I've been happy with FreeBSD. For some reason it's always made a little more sense to me than other *nix OS (It has great documentation). The ports system is great for applying updates, and I've had little problem with updates breaking things. Pkg_updating especially helps.
With any distro, if you're using packages that come with the os or even through 3rd party repo's, you're going to have to wait a least a little bit for them to build the latest version of the software you want, and sometimes that's a good thing because there may be stability or dependency issues you might not know about.
Of course, you can always build directly from source, then you never have to wait.
PS: Upgrading the base os is also quite easy and stable using freebsd-update even between major versions.