Re: [gentoo-user] EAPI packages

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 10:08 AM, hw <hw@×××××.de> wrote:
>
> I infrequently update Gentoo because I´m *always* running into problems
> like this.  'Infrequently' means about every 3 months at home, and not
> since, IIRC, 2015-02 here at work.  The last update at home got stalled
> because perl cannot be updated, and I haven´t had the time to look into
> that to finish it.

You're probably always running into problems like this because you
infrequently update Gentoo.

If you ran it every day you'd probably only run into issues every
couple of months, and when you did you'd have it immediately narrowed
down to a few packages since that is all that has changed.

>
> If you say that you need to update more frequently than every 3 months
> for not to have problems with the update process itself, I can only
> conclude that Gentoo is entirely unsuited for servers --- and for home
> use as well other than for test machines perhaps.
>

If you're looking for a distro designed to just work with no hands-on,
then you should probably look elsewhere.

Put it another way, why are you using Gentoo instead of Debian or
CentOS in the first place?

Gentoo is useful when you want to mess with the configuration of the
distro itself, not when you just want to throw a few files in
/var/www/htdocs and be done with it.

Gentoo can be made to work rather well on servers, but you have to
know what you're doing.  You can't just run emerge -u world on a
production server that hasn't been touched in a year and expect to
work.  However, you certainly could set up your own local repository,
pull in updates as needed (certainly including frequent security
updates), build binary packages and deploy to your test environment,
make sure everything is good, and then deploy those binary packages to
your production servers. You can accomplish a lot of things that way
that you couldn't accomplish with CentOS or Debian.

However, if all you want is the same binaries Debian already gives
you, then just run Debian.  It isn't like apache runs better just
because you compiled it yourself.  Gentoo is about tweaking things.
And if you're going to tweak things in an enterprise environment then
you need to be doing QA.

If you really want to be deploying updates into production without any
testing then you ought to stick with the likes of CentOS/RHEL.  That's
basically their entire value-add.  Debian stable would be another
option.

-- 
Rich