[gst-devel] Linux distro preferred for gstreamer?

[Ron McOuat]

I would like to ask a question about which Linux distro would be best 
for hosting a gstreamer application bundle I am working on. I hope I am 
not starting a distro war by asking this question, :-) just looking for 
some practical advice. I searched for this in the archives and didn't 
find much. The system I am building is a server in a corporate 
environment, not exposed to the public internet which is an improved 
version of systems that already exist but don't use gstreamer.

Facts as applicable to me:

1) I am using very recent gstreamer code (stable + patches), some I did 
a small amount of work on which is in CVS head but not released yet so I 
build from source.

2) I am using Fedora 10 on my dev machine and no issues there.

3) I deploy to Centos 5.2 which is where I start to have problems. 
Gstreamer won't even configure because flex is too old. I pulled a 
Fedora 10 build tree over and I could see from trying to run that, even 
if I solved the flex problem I would have glib version problems which is 
a major base dependency of the system. This indicates it will require 
major work to get the latest gstreamer to run. I hear rumors of a 5.3 
release which will bring in a newer set of versions for dependent 
libraries which may work but that is future stuff.

4) Since a lot of the field machines are running even older (2005) 
software than Centos 5.2 I am ready to do a mass cold metal install 
across them in the next few months.

5) I have dabbled with Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 and the latest Ubuntu is 
pretty much on par with Fedora wrt revision levels. If I get everything 
to run on 8.04 then I have an LTS release for the field which should be 
good for patches for quite a while. Switching to Ubuntu isn't a big 
problem for me other than finger memory on how to do admin things. I 
have used UNIX of one form or another since 1982 but the Redhat 
derivatives certainly feel more comfortable for me with 10 years of use.

In conclusion, I find the version gap between bleeding edge and stable 
is wider for Redhat derived systems vs Ubuntu. This also sometimes leads 
to driver support issues when new hardware is purchased. I am reluctant 
to put Fedora into production because of the high level of update load 
and short patch support lifetime, so at this point I am leaning towards 
using Ubuntu.

Any comments or sage advice from gstreamer developers? Just looking for 
confirmation of my conclusion or did I miss something in my evaluation?

Thanks for your time, this may seem off topic but my main application 
dependency is gstreamer.

Ron