Quote:
Originally Posted by TobiSGD
(Post 5307540)
I am somewhat irritated that OpenBSD has the same support cycle as Fedora (never realized that before, since I only had short testing runs with OpenBSD), yet we recommend OpenBSD for servers, while usually Fedora (and other distributions with short support cycles) is dismissed for that use case.
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OpenBSD is an operating system. As such OpenBSD should be compared (roughly) with the Linux kernel rather than a Linux distribution such as fedora/Red Hat who do not develop their own kernel and base system - if it should be compared at all.
In general terms, OpenBSD (as with other BSD forks) is
much smaller than a given Linux distribution and almost everything in the base system is developed by OpenBSD developers, or if not, extensively audited and/or specially built to conform (for example X.org (xenocara) which has proper privilege separation as standard among other things (yes OpenBSD actually has X.org as a 3rd party component of it's base system unlike other *BSDs where it's a port).
Quote:
Originally Posted by TobiSGD
(Post 5307540)
Yes, I know that OpenBSD still is more secure and stable, due to the different focus of the development team, but how can we ever know with such a short release cycle (read:testing phase)?
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They are their own upstream, as such their testing process is probably much more streamlined and do not include the same 3rd party software as a Linux distribution like fedora or Debian (who pretty much throw anything and everything into the mix) and happen to have a well proven track record. They also manage to develop software such as OpenSSH, OpenNTPD and LibreSSL and more.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TobiSGD
(Post 5307540)
Or am I missing something?
Anyways, following that logic, wouldn't a rolling release model fit best for OpenBSD?
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The 'best' OpenBSD branch is OpenBSD -current. You
could consider this "rolling", but in the Linux world, that term usually refers to some Linux distribution which constantly pushes out 'bleeding edge software' ready or not. OpenBSD -current is anything but that.
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq5.html#Flavors
Quote:
It is worth pointing out that the name "-stable" is not intended to imply that -current is unreliable or less robust in production. Rather, the APIs (how the programs talk to the OS) and features of -current are changing and evolving, whereas the operation and APIs of -stable are the same as the release it is based on, so you shouldn't have to relearn features of your system or change any configuration files, or have any problem adding additional applications to your system.
In fact, as our hope is to continually improve OpenBSD, the goal is that -current should be more reliable, more secure, and of course, have greater features than -stable. Put bluntly, the "best" version of OpenBSD is -current.
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The important difference here between OpenBSD and your example fedora, is that, as is the case with most *BSD operating systems, the base system is OpenBSD, the ports tree is not - it's 3rd party software. In most *BSD OSs ports install to the /usr/local target, rather than /
This means that ports can be built and installed as a non root user.
It's best to read the official explanation:
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq15.html#Intro
A given OpenBSD -release provides pre-built ports known as 'packages', to update these at all, you have three options:
1) Wait 6 months until the next OpenBSD release and ports rebuild.
2) Follow the -stable branch and build from source via the ports tree.
3) Sort it out yourself.
If you go to the openbsd-misc mailing list asking questions about out of date ports, you can expect to get ignored.
