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Comment by bandrami | Hacker News Reader

Then that's wonderful news to you: your long-release-cycle OS insulates you from every single worry about this update. This is why distributions like CentOS and Debian Stable exist.

(I just realized that might sound sarcastic to The Kids These Days, but it's 100% serious: that's the whole point of these long-term distributions, and those of us who have to manage large numbers of systems love it.)

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... which in turn resulted in TensorFlow not being able to be used in clusters for a long, long time: https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/110

Which was the point. That was a long, long list of TensorFlow bugs that were avoided.

I just want to add to that, just to offer a perspective that people not concerned with the upkeep of software always realize: In the general case, when you keep software around for long some bugs will linger. But as long as the issues are well known that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Sometimes you have to work around some corner case or performance anomaly in another layer. You don't want to apply fixes to underlying software willy-nilly without first re-evaluating what you did.

So sometimes stable distributions will avoid fixing bugs for good reason. (That doesn't go for security issues, of course.) And if that's not what you want most distributions have a more suitable branch for you.

> most distributions have a more suitable branch for you

Exactly. CentOS has Fedora, Debian has sid/ubuntu/derivatives, Slackware has -current. If you don't require a stable platform (and most developers don't) then you're welcome to join people on the unstable side of things, making the next stable side of things.

The problem is most of the time developers working with clusters do not have control of which distribution to use. TensorFlow was considered stable (or at least stable enough for research) for a long time before it can be used with glibc 2.12.

That's odd, I was able to compile both bazel and tensorflow from source since early spring 2016 on RHEL 6.5 (not that it was straight forward ...), so it should work for centOS as well.

It certainly wasn't straightforward and took us two weeks to get right :(

And it's not like gcc 4.8 was a bad compiler anyway. It has decent C++14 support too.

This "long term" cycle is also why I get to "enjoy" C++98 and not C++11 for the next 20 years. But I'm happy it's more..."stable", I guess.

If you care about the difference between C++98 and C++11, CentOS is probably not the distribution for you. CentOS is for administrators who need to support a years-long lifecycle of an existing program.

The problem is that he still has to target that platform as a developer, meaning avoiding dependencies like new libstdc++ versions.

Although one can always link statically...

Why would someone target an old LTS distribution as a development target? That makes no sense.

Because your users are running it?

Ship them the dependencies too?

For Debian/Ubuntu there are always backports and PPAs.

And you can require RHEL7, or ship them Docker images, or a statically compiled blob.

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