Robert Bridge wrote:
On Wed, 1 Oct 2008 11:55:21 +0100
"Kerin Millar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Well, this post turned out to be a lot longer than I had anticipated.
But I've seen so many comments that allude to Gentoo somehow being
unfit for purpose because it doesn't freeze off a so-called "stable"
tree so many times that, frankly, I get fed up with it and figured
that something had to be said. Gentoo, whilst certainly having its
fair share of foibles, doesn't get enough credit for the things that
it does well and the things that it does right. If one doesn't like
the way that Gentoo does things then there are surely other distros
out there that will meet one's expectations, such as they are.
Right, imagine a live server getting hit by the expat problem, or a
major gcc/glibc change? They hurt, they seriously hurt.
Unless you tested them on your test box.
That's what the "static package" people are referring to. A server that
can be set up, and once running should need minimal updating, for
security reasons. You can't do that safely in Gentoo.
Been doing it for six years in production.
Some people are happy with regularly changing packages, restarting
services every month because a new version of the server is in tree,
dealing with the breakage induced by things like python upgrades, bash
upgrades, portage upgrades, gcc upgrades, ...
Or not dealing with any breakages because we did our jobs as admins and
wrote up an actual upgrade plan which we then tested on staging. Which
is the same thing anyone who does not want an outage does whether it's
Gentoo, Oracle, RHEL, Cisco, Windows, whatever. People who take their
distros word for anything eventually have outages.
But for a 24/7 uptime on a high load server, most people consider those
to be unacceptable. Now Gentoo can be got to not do those, but as
anyone will tell you, updating a Gentoo box after a year is painful,
and when you have to update to cover a critical security hole? Now try updating
a Debian box after a year?
Don't wait a year to apply updates?
Don't mistake one awkward piece of software which is not supported in
the other distros for the general properties of those distros. Gentoo
is good for tweaking, it's good for doing "Your own thing", that does
not make it automagically better than Debian or RHEL, or SLES in the
high-stability stakes. And, sorry to say this, one nice anecdote
doesn't either.
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-504541.html
One of the strengths that people tend to miss.
"Where Gentoo has really shines is in projects that fail. No really.
We've all done that "hey lets try upgrading to Apache 2.2 and see how
well it works." In Gentoo you change a few lines, emerge apache, run
some tests, realize it's not quite there, change a few lines, emerge
apache again, and you're back to where you started. Total time about two
hours.
Or even projects that go somewhere. "Hey I need X packages for testing."
Gentoo installs, some minor tweaks, and hand off to the dev. When we go
to production I know I can get the same package because I let Gentoo do
the work rather than half ass a build because I didn't have time for non
production issues when the project had no priority. Naturally there some
changes in config in production, but we can go to production faster
without having to repackage, re QA, and then release. "
kashani
