On 24 Oct 2008, at 12:42 pm, Jon Aquilina wrote:
but why waste time sifting through all 26,000+ pkgs in the repos
when u can
have a distro with repos focused on clustering pkgs?
They're grouped according to purpose, so I didn't have to do any such
sifting. That list I produced from a cursory glance through the
scientific software section, and the few packages I already knew
about. I also very much agree with Carsten - there have been any
number of occasions when people have asked me for really quite obscure
bits and pieces of software, and I've thought "Oh, that's never going
to be packaged up already... oh, wait, yes it is... aptitude install
really-obscure-package"
The point I was countering was the idea of creating [yet another]
derived distribution, when it isn't necessary. Maintaining a Linux
distribution is an *enormous* amount of effort, especially if you're
going to attempt to keep up with security patches and so on, so why
anyone would want to do it themselves is beyond me. Just use one of
the widely used and well supported distros, and supplement it with a
local package repository if you have local custom needs. This is what
we do; we use plain old Debian Etch, with a local package repository
of a few things we have updated to more recent software versions
(cfengine, rsync, multipath, heartbeat and one or two other things).
I do the equivalent thing for SLES10, for our Oracle boxes. When we
decided to move from Debian Sarge to Etch, it was a really simple
move; we had half a dozen or so local packages to rebuild against the
updated distro, and that was it, we were up and running.
The amount of effort required is pretty small (at least for anyone
who's passingly familiar with build RPMs or DEBs from source)
Tim
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