Re: Windows over linux

On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 9:24 AM, Andy Levy <andy.levy_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> And if the skillset in your shop is primarily Windows, using Solaris
> or Linux would require a lot of expensive training, or hiring an
> expensive new system admin (or contracting for one on an as-needed
> basis), for a single service.
>

Yup. (Solaris licensing has also gotten extremely expensive since the
Oracle buy-out, FWIW, and it's no longer free for anything except
development and evaluation.)

Subversion is a good cross-platform app, so I would suggest that most people
should go with whatever they have the most institutional knowledge about;
e.g., a Windows shop should probably host it on Windows, and a site that
runs mostly Linux should go with Linux. It's flexible enough that there's
no reason to introduce a new OS just for the sake of Subversion.

With modern versions of those operating systems any stability differences
are, IMHO, minor compared to the problems that happen when you ask people to
suddenly administer an OS they're unfamiliar with. Keep in mind in a
professional environment, installing and configuring the OS itself is
actually the easy part of the problem -- integrating a new, "foreign" OS
into existing backup, authentication, and network monitoring infrastructure
can be a real challenge.

-- 
David Brodbeck
System Administrator, Linguistics
University of Washington