Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Custom ebuilds for CoreOS

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Dec 2, 2014 at 12:37 PM, James <wireless@×××××××××××.com> wrote:
> Rich Freeman <rich0 <at> gentoo.org> writes:
>
>> You seem to be wanting a minimalist profile of Gentoo, not CoreOS.
>
> YES!, I want Gentoo to "CRUSH" CoreOS because we can and our goal is not
> to deceptively move users to a "rent the binary" jail. OK?
>

Gentoo and CoreOS really target different uses.  I certainly could see
one being installed more than the other just as there are no doubt
more tubes of toothpaste sold in a year than there are iPhones sold in
a year (or, at least I hope there are).  That doesn't mean that
toothpaste is "crushing" the iPhone.

This isn't unlike Gentoo vs ChromeOS.  You're comparing a
general-purpose distro (and one that is even more
general-purpose/customizable than a typical one) to a tool made to do
exactly one job well.

CoreOS is just about hosting containers.  Sure, some of those
containers might be "rent the binary jails" - but you could run Gentoo
in one of those containers just as easily.  CoreOS really competes
with the likes of VMWare/KVM, or even OpenStack.  If you don't want to
run a bazillion containers, then sure it isn't something you're going
to be interested in.

>
>> It isn't intended as a starting point for embedded projects or such.
>> Sure, maybe you could make it work, but sooner or later CoreOS will
>> make some change that will make you very unhappy because they aren't
>> making it for you.
>
> CoreOS will never be in my critical path. Large corporations will turn
> computer scientist and hackers into WalMart type-employees. Conglomerates
> are the enemy, imho. I fear Conglomerates much more than any group
> of government idiots. ymmv.

Well, then don't run it!  Large corporations are actually the
least-progressive when it comes to adopting these kinds of
technologies.  I actually see thing being embraced by mid-sized
companies first.  The "new way" of doing these things lets you quickly
scale up from development to production without a lot of manual
configuration of individual hosts.  I work for a big company and
they're still doing lots of manual installation scripts that get
signed and dated like it is still the 80s.  It isn't Walmart-type work
primarily because it is so error-prone we always need people to fix
all the stuff that breaks.  My LUG meets at a mid-sized VoIP company
that uses the likes of Puppet/Chef for everything and I'm sure Docker
is on their radar as something to think about next - they're hardly
robots but they realize that they'd rather have their bright employees
doing something other than dealing with botched updates on hosts that
bring down 47 VMs at a time.  Their customers like that they can just
pay them for a VoIP account and get full service for a low cost,
versus paying the kid next door to figure out how to custom-rig a PBX
for them.  And, yes, they use Asterisk.

--
Rich