[Condor-devel] Is Redefining OpSys a Good Idea?

[Douglas Thain <dthain@xxxxxx>]

Howdy -

I am about ready to throw in the towel on Linux compatibility.

Programs compiled on RHEL5 don't run on RHEL6, and going
between Red Hat and Debian is a joke.  Our users get upset
every year during the upgrade cycle when nobody knows whether
their jobs will run correctly.

We are already defining a custom attribute redhat_version which
is pulled from /etc/redhat-release via the startd cron, but everyone
forgets to do this and gets burned eventually.  I also don't see an obvious
way to programmatically get redhat_version into SUBMIT_EXPRS so
it matches automatically but also allows the smart user to remove the
requirement.

In principle, I can just redefine OpSys to be "RHEL5" or "DEBIAN" instead
of "LINUX" in STARTD_EXPRS and SUBMIT_EXPRS, to make
it abundantly clear to users that these are completely different systems.

However, is this a good idea?

Is OpSys hard coded anywhere that would prevent this from working?

Does anyone have a better solution to dealing with the Linux mess?

Thanks,
Doug