Re: [gentoo-server] QA or an unchanging portage tree?

[Andrew Cooks]

Kurt Lieber wrote:
> Which would you find more valuable and why?

I 'vote' for a more robust QA of the main tree.

I'm running Gentoo on about 10 servers, doing NFS, Samba, Imap & SMTP, 
Web (Static, PHP and Java stuff), dial-in, remote logging, cvs and other 
arb. stuff.

It's not life and death stuff - these machines are all used by the 
department of Computer Science at the University of Pretoria, which 
explains the number of different services used.

Many people would argue that it's better to do updates during holidays, 
but I've found that it's easier for me to do the minor updates, that 
won't disrupt service, during the morning when almost everyone's in class.

This system also tells me when a new major version (ie apache 2 or the 
coming samba 3) is stable, so that I should seriously start planning for 
the update. Usually, a major update can also be slipped through when 
nobody's looking, after some testing on non-production machines.

I've never used debian before, so I can't generalise and say that the 
versioned distro approach is completely bad, but on DeadRat, I was 
struggling to keep machines up to date and major updates almost always 
involved downtime.

Andrew