The separation of the core product and the distribution setup and packaging onto separate media has afforded us greater flexibility in our product release cycle. We are able to introduce support for new Linux distributions quickly and asynchronously to the core product release schedule. In addition, modifications to the core product due to distribution differences are rare.
As an example, we recently added TurboLinux 6.5 to our list of supported operating systems. Since TurboLinux is derived from the RedHat distribution, most of the distribution enabling was pretty much plain sailing. The only slight problem was caused by our NFS Application Recovery Kit (used to provide High Availability NFS in a cluster). It turns out that on TurboLinux the RPC portmapper isn't started by default, so the NFS recovery kit was unable to start the NFS daemons. To get around this problem, the list of required daemons was abstracted (which required modifications to the kit) and portmap was added to the list of required daemons.