[gentoo-dev] Re: where goes Gentoo?

[Sven Köhler]

> This is kinda bloggish, because it's basically a transcription of an
> IRC monologue.  My apologies if it's hard to follow...  Nonetheless,
> I'm interested in how other developers feel on the topics I bring up
> below.

Though i'm a developer, i'm not a gentoo-developer.

> In my humble opinion, Gentoo is missing too many points to be an
> enterprise Linux.  We commit to a live tree.  We don't have true QA,
> testing or tinderbox.  We don't have paid staff, alpha/beta/rc cycles.
> We don't really have product lifecycles, since we don't generally
> backport fixes to older versions, requiring instead for people to
> update to a more recent release.  We don't have, and probably will
> never be able to offer, support contracts.  We support as wide a range
> of hardware as the upstream kernel, plus hardware that requires
> external drivers; we don't have access to a great deal of the hardware
> for which we provide drivers.  We understand when real life gets in
> the way of bug-fixing, because all our developers are volunteers.

QA is a problem. Bugs get fixed, but often they are only fixed in ~x86
versions, not in the stable x86 series. For example baselayout: there
are lot of ~x86 - miles ahead of that is marked x86. Maintainers think,
it's sufficient to only fix the most recent version. How do they
legitimate that?

And yes, Gentoo does not backport patches to older version. But is it
Gentoo's responsibility? If there's a bug in Postgresql 7.x and 8.x, and
the PostgreSQL people only fix it 8.x-series - well: Debian and Redhat
will backport the patches propably. They is a big reason why all the
distrubutions with precompiled packages do that:
- the updates has to be binary compatible with the old one

Gentoo doesn't suffer from that limitation. Gentoo offers ways to
migrate a system from openssl 0.9.6 to openssl 0.9.7 for example. Other
distributions doesn't offer that - although they could with better
package managers.

Also i've had too many SuSE- or Redhat-systems in the past that were
unsupported because RedHat and SuSE decide, to stop supplying updates
for older version of their distribution. So what am i supposed to do in
that case? Updating the whole distribution causing me troubles to
migrate everything to the new version (apache2 instead of apache 1.3, etc.)

With Gentoo, this is usually done as time goes by - though you have to
be very careful sometimes.

Administrating a Gentoo system takes time - much time, but ...

... writing my own packages for - let's say Redhat - takes more time
than writing an ebuild for Gentoo. If you have to maintain a system with
very special software, i would recomm Gentoo.

> I like the idea of Gentoo on alternative arches and in embedded
> environments.  Not because I want Sony to start using Gentoo on
> walkmans, but purely because the idea of running Linux on a PDA is
> cool.  I'd like Gentoo to be a place where neat things are developed.
> If RH or SuSE (or another for-profit Linux vendor) wants to take some
> of those developments and use them to make a profit, that's fine with
> me.  We're over here having fun.

I like Gentoo, since everything is compiled - which offers much
flexibility, that precompiled packages don't offer.

Just some days ago, someone reinstalled a Server where we had PostGreSQL
8.0 running. He chose to install Debian - which offers PostGreSQL 7.4 -
so what did he do? He compiled PostGreSQL 8.0 himself, to be abled to
use our existing database. This will become hell the more packages you
have to compile on you own. Any configure-make-install-like package,
Perl-Module, etc... can be easy installed by using an ebuild.

In addition Gentoo is the only distribution i know, that supports
installing multiple Java-version etc...
A must-have for every real java-developer.

> Also I find it amusing when people say that Gentoo exists for the
> users.  I think that is wrong.  Gentoo exists for the *developers*.
> It's our playground, and it's the reason we use a live tree rather
> than switching to an actually sane approach.  The users are cool
> because they point out bugs, help solve problems on bugzilla, suggest
> enhancements, provide patches, and notify us of package updates.
> Sometimes they become developers.  But the truth is that Gentoo sees
> improvement and maintenance in the areas that appeal to the
> developers.  And that is why Gentoo exists for the developers first,
> the users second.

by using Gentoo, you learn much about Linux (the Kernel) and all the
nice little software that makes it a usable OS. Somewhere on the net,
there was page about Gentoo and Debian. The conslusion was, that Gentoo
is a great distribution to learn, and Debian is a stable work-horse.
Well, Debian is stable workhorse - as long as you don't have a very
special configuration. AFAIK, Debian doesn't drop support for their
distributions that fast - and they doen't release a new distribution
every few months (like SuSE does).

So i'd say: use Debian, if you have a relativly normal system to
maintain, use Gentoo if you have the time - and never ever use Redhat or
SuSE.


Thx
  Sven