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On Sunday 22 March 2009 07:50:04 Mike Diehl wrote: |
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> So here is the question: Are these just growing pains, or is this the |
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> trend with Gentoo? If I resolve to update frequently, will these problems |
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> become more rare? |
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I've been using Gentoo for 4 years now, my main desktop is still running code |
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that I compiled on the first install in 2005. And I'm on my third Gentoo |
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notebook in a row. Absurb update issues simply don't happen, as long as you |
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follow the rules: |
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Update weekly on <~arch> |
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Update monthly on <arch> |
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Adjust to suit your needs. |
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You ran into the mktemp issue, which feels about a year old from this corner, |
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so Iguess you have not been updating regularly. I'm not sure where you got the |
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advice to update only when you need a new feature or a fix, but it is not |
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workable in practice. |
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Gentoo does have issues, but the majority of them are with changes to |
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packages, not changes to Gentoo. Remember that with Gentoo you are rebuilding |
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a live system on the actual system itself. We don't have build farms that |
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rebuild the entire distro and push out new rpms nightly - so the problems that |
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can hit Gentoo don't happen to binary distro users. |
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Take expat. It got an upgrade a long time ago which coudl break Gnome entirely |
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if you didn't do it right. There was nothing the devs could do really, because |
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that's how those packages were written. The normal case is to have a bare |
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machine, build expat, then build Gnome. On Gentoo, you want to do all of this |
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while using the Gnome that needs to be rebuilt. If you update regularly, |
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you'll find lots of people around who know what the steps are and can help. |
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Today, most of us have forgotten and need to turn to Google to find the |
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howtos. |
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If you find this happens more and more often with gentoo, it is probably a |
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symptom of more and more useful packages out there, that are being developed |
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faster with more features. See it as a sign of success on the part of FLOSS |
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rather than a failing of Gentoo. |
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And I would advise AGAINST gentoo on your out-of-state servers. They need too |
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much pampering to keep them stable. I have about 100 machines at work, a |
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mixture of 30% FreeBSD, SuSE <ugh>, some Centos and even a single lone Solaris |
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machine. The worst of the lot has to be the SVN server, running Gentoo. No-one |
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will touch it anymore, and the last time I did, I broke it horribly with a |
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conflict between portage and cpan Perl modules. |
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-- |
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alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com |