Modern development environment on dated RHEL

[Omer Zak]

1. Is RHEL 4.7 still being supported by RedHat, and are security patches
still being made available?  If yes, when is this support due to end?

2. Do you wish to use the up-to-date tools only for development, or also
in software to be delivered to the customer and/or deployed in the
company's operations?

3. How about installing a VM in RHEL 4.7 and doing your development in
the virtual machine, using a more recent version?  This will at least
reduce the number of packages to be backported to RHEL 4.7 to those
which are needed for running the VM.

4. How difficult would it be to change company policy?



On Tue, 2010-04-27 at 09:02 +0200, Elazar Leibovich wrote:
> Due to company's policy, our development desktop stations must have
> RHEL 4.7 installed on them.
> However, RHEL's packages are extermely out of date (for instance, it
> still have python 2.3, etc.), and we wish to use many up too date
> development tools (I'm not aiming to the bleeding edge, however a
> stable release from the last year seems to me a desirable goal).
> We mostly need user-space software (editors, scripting environment,
> etc.).
> What's the best method to
>      1. Use reasonably new user-space software on RHEL 4.7
>      2. Not to break too much the entire RHEL echosystem, or at least
>         provide to ourselves a clear way to upgrade the foreign
>         packages we'll install.
> I'm not really familiar with managing Red-Hat distribution, so any advice will be welcomed.

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