[rt-users] Why I am recommending 3.6 over 3.8 to my boss

[Jesse Vincent]

Wes,

> I strongly recommend going with the 3.6 version of RT.  The install takes a few minutes, and it otherwise meets all the requirements of our project.  Migration of old queues is simple.  There is cost savings in the near and long-term.  

RT 3.6 is no longer being actively developed and receives only critical security fixes.  If 3.6, meets your needs, by all means use it, though we'd not recommend it to a client who was paying for our help or advice at this point.

Please do be careful to ensure that you're running 3.6.10, as all earlier releases are vulnerable to CVE 2009-3585.

> I CAN do a manual install of RT3.8 using the Best Practical install scripts.  It is not terribly hard.  However, the long-term costs of this are large.  The install scripts put all the binaries, configuration files, and libraries in the wrong places for RHEL/CentOS, and working outside the package manager means files could be clobbered at any time.  


If you'd like RT to be installed into RedHat FHS locations, you should use

./confiure --enable-layout=RH

> On the other hand, the rpms for RT3.6 use the package manager and put all the config files in /etc, all the perl modules in the perl modules dir, and the various tools in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin.  The non-standard install using the scripts creates recurring costs in the future as the system is significantly more difficult to update and harder to maintain, like by a factor of 50 (five minutes compared to 4 hours).

Indeed, the maintenance burdens of an RPM upgrade for 3.6 are
likely to be small as you're not going to see any bugfix or feature
releases. Historically, the RPM installs of RT haven't had much in the
way of cross-major-version upgradability, so if you decide later to come
up to 3.8 to get Dashboards (automated emailed reporting), reasonable
support for mail generated by a modern Exchange server, the refreshed
UI, built in iCal support, several years of bug fixes and performance
improvements or any of the other features in 3.8, it might be rather
more work than if you'd started with 3.8.

I _do_ hear you about wanting a supported RPM.

Best,
Jesse