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