Re: [gentoo-dev] gentoo-server

[Klaus Wagner]

On Fri, Nov 26, 2004 at 08:29:37AM -0800, M. Edward Borasky wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-11-26 at 11:17 -0500, Dan Meltzer wrote:
> > One thing I have always noticed about gentoo is that it is lacking in
> > the server department, for whatever reason.  I was wondering if there
> > are any plans to remedy this, I have thought about a few possible
> > ideas.
> >
> > 1) add an emerge server-system class, this class would contain apps
> > that may not be as new, but they would be known to be stable, and work
> > well with everything.  THe last thing a server admin needs is to be
> > debugging which package in an emerge -aDuv world is messing up.
> >
> > 2) make better use of glsa-check, maybe an addon that parses that
> > output and automatically does upgrades known not to break anything.
> >
> > 3)  I dunno.... what do you think?
> >
> > Is this a possibilty//has it been talked about at all?
>
> I don't think Gentoo is "lacking in the server department" at all. It
> hasn't been deployed much in the server marketplace because of the
> overwhelming market share position of Red Hat, and to a lesser extent
> Suse and Mandrake. In other words, this isn't a technical issue, it's a
> marketing issue. Maybe when there are Gentoo Certified Engineers, and a
> corporate-style accountability, Gentoo will at least get some attention.
>
> Then again, I'm not sure that a "non-profit" organization like the
> Gentoo Foundation can "legitimately" compete with Red Hat or Novell.

The decision for an OS is very often political, not technical.

We used Redhat (non ES) very heavyly since it was the most spread
linux system. It was hard enough to get some official support from
the hardware companies because they tended to say "Use a real OS instead of
this, then you won't have this problem".

Times have changed, now many hardware companies support linux.
Now, as the Redhat and SUSE has Enterprise versions they tend to say
"use the enterprise versions". HP is a bit different, as they support
debian now.

Anyway I don't know any hardware company supporting Gentoo.

I don't mean support like "I am too dumb installing gentoo" or
"help me I can't find my network properties". I need some kind
of guarantie that things will work with this or that software.

-----

Beside that I see some a technical reason:

Heterogenous environments

First of all, if a server is heavy loaded, it tend not to compile
anything there. Gentoo supports binary packages when they are created
as part of the emerge process, a good thing.

But what if you have very different machines ? compile everything 
with i386 settings? Different build flags would mean differnent build
machines or different build runs

regards klaus

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