RE: [gentoo-server] Stable portage tree

Constant and needless updating servers is the exact opposite of
"stable".  Server stability equates to money in almost all business,
IMHO.  Why on earth would I risk my stability on a daily basis by
emerging world?  Remember that the ONLY reason to upgrade a server is if
there is discernable benefit.  The benefit may be a security fix, bug
fix, supportability, enhancement, or it just looks cooler -- that's for
the user/benefactor(s) to decide.

By default, Portage doesn't lend itself to this.  I don't need/want the
latest Postgres just because it's available, especially when the upgrade
would require data and/or app migration.  Upgrades warrant testing.  I
can't justify spend hundreds of man-hours testing all available apps on
a given system just because some program went from v4.3 to 4.3-1.

I also can't justify upgrading just because Gentoo no longer wants to
keep last year's ebuild around.  Thankfully, a sysadmin can make use of
OVERLAY and rsync (*without* "--delete"!) to create their own portage
tree, complete with all the old rebuilds.  Anyone that's tried to
upgrade an old OpenSSH knows what happens on the ensuing revdep-rebuild
-- ebuilds are gone, and you're stuck in the mud.

RedHat is stable.  It's also a PITA to maintain for some business apps.
Building Oracle on RedHat requires arcane incantations and animal
sacrifice.  But doing the same on Gentoo is the same as any flavor of
Unix.  So, I use RedHat in production, but Gentoo on my R&D desktop.
But that doesn't mean I don't need stability.  Any major libs get
changed and I need to relink Oracle.  Then I need to wonder what changed
and how to test it.  It's just not worth the hassle for almost all
updates for me.

I'm way short on time and way too terse here.  This is the kinda stuff
that needs to be debated over copius amounts of really freakin good
beer.

My $.02,
Rich


-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Efros [mailto:powerman@××××××××××××××××××.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2006 6:30 AM
To: gentoo-server@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-server] Stable portage tree

Hi!

On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 11:00:21AM +0100, Ian P. Christian wrote:
> Updating every 6/12 months is fine in principle, but it means going
> though 10's of machines updating config files and resolving conflics.
> This is a painful task, it's fine for 1 machine, it's fine for 5...
but
> you have any real number of servers to maintain and it ends up taking
> hours or days to upgrade your servers.

Yeah, your right. But there simple solution for this: update your
servers
every 3-4 days, and you will be surprised how ease and quick this task
become.
You'll need from a couple of seconds to 2-3 minutes in average for such
update!
Usually a few not important for you applications will be updated, which
can't broke anything on your server, and which require few seconds to
update their config files. Sometimes one of applications critical for
your
server become updated, and this require more attention, but it's much
better to update ONE such important application instead of updating ALL
of
such important applications every 6-12 month. And this way you always
can
ease fallback to previous version of this application if something goes
wrong on your server, add broken (for you) version to
/etc/portage/package.mask, report bug and wait for next update.

I've tried all these ways of updating my servers in last 2 years:
update every few days, update only security issues, update every 6-12
months
and found first way much more ease, effective and manageable than
others.
With two other ways I also wanna 'stable portage tree', with first way I
don't need it - ARCH=x86 IS A 'stable portage tree' for me now. :)

-- 
			WBR, Alex.
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