Axel Thimm (Axel.Thimm@ATrpms.net) said:
And I only mentioned that the Linux part is homogeneous. Ever wondered why the majority of Unix admins that have skills in managing heterogeneous Unix system have a physicist's background? It is far more important to have a good mips/$ and some scientists on salary, than to spend all budget for the IT staff's system management.
If you are spending all the budget for IT staff to do system management, you're doing it wrong; there's no reason that systems management should be on the par you're talking about. There are places that run hundreds to thousands of machines with a single administrator. Honestly? It sounds like a vicious cycle of "we don't think we have the time to set up a consistent platform, so we don't, so we have to spend too much time managing it, so we don't have the time to set up a new platform..."
If you want consistent results, run a consistent platform.
So you outrule Fedora? Because consistent means even more than a stable API/ABI, RHEL comes close to that, but switching to RHEL because a distro does not want to offer static libs is not reason enough, especially in light of development of key components like gfortran that is reflected in RHEL only a couple years after it makes it into the non-enterprise platforms.
RHEL doesn't even *ship* this scientific stuff, for a large part.
All I'm saying is that we shouldn't continue to support this sort of fundamentally-unsupportable setup ad nauseam - it's time to think about how to solve this in a sane manner, rather than continuing to paper over the problem. I don't see how, at a minium, moving the static libraries to -static packages changes things - if, as you say, everyone just chucks libraries manually in /usr/local, then how is this making anything worse for them?
Bill