[TriLUG] debian in production

[Rick DeNatale]

On 10/21/05, Scott Lundgren <trilug at capitalfellow.com> wrote:
> >
> > Ignoring issues of familiarity---which can't be ignored, really, but
> > you're the only one who can judge them---I think the only issue is
> > that stable needs to _already have what you're going to need_, because
> > that's what you're going to have to work with for the next two years.
> >
>
> Micheal,
>
> Ah, now that was good to know. I'll need to review the requirements for
> cpanel's software since that's the reason for trying to run Debian on
> Sparc, but generally I'm aiming for a base layer of Apache2 with the
> prefork_mpm, a custom compile of PHP5 (for oracle 10g connectivity) and
> MySQL 4.1.x. The benefit I'm looking for from cpanel is making is to be
> able to centralize my deployments (versions, updates) of  phpmyadmin,
> awstats and related tools than trying to manage all that by hand or in
> some cobbled fashion.
>
> Searching through the debian, packages list I see apache2 and mysql4.1
> are there. I'll see I'll need to spend some more time comparing the
> versions of other components I'll need to compile PHP5 with what
> versions of those components debian stable provides, could you give me
> an overview how you blend syncs with the "testing" package tree? Do you
> run say 90% of the server from stable packages and only selectively
> update certain software to testing packages? On a scale from mostly
> harmless to nutball crazy what's the opinion of this package tree
> mixing?

Right now, Debian stable should be fairly up to date, since it hasn't
been "released" for very long. The issue, of course, is the history of
how long it has taken between stable releases of Debian.

In addition to Debian stable vs. testing, you might consider Ubuntu,
which is based on Debian, although for Sparc it's only available right
now for UltraSparcs.

Ubuntu has taken the approach of spinning off releases which mix in
newer packages from testing, and releasing them regularly twice a year
in April, and October.  There's been quite a bit of FUD about how
Ubuntu might or might not be considered a part of the Debian community
or a threat to it.  A lot of this seems to come two directions, fans
of non-Debian distros who might have suffered from updating problems
(dependency hell), and predict that Ubuntu will turn out to be a fork
which threatens the future of Debians reputation for easy upward
migration; and Debian insiders who fear losing their grip.

>From what I've seen so far, I think of it as an advance team which
moves the ball forward while regularly feeding fixes and enhancements
back into the main Debian stream.

Ubuntu has also recently broadened their coverage in terms of both
purpose and platforms.   Besides Kubuntu as a KDE based desktop
alternative packaging, they've recently announced Edubuntu (for
educational users) and Ubuntu server. These are all just CD packagings
of different subsets of the available packages, and have all been
released either concurrently with, or within days of the latest Ubuntu
release last week.

They've also anounced the Ubuntu ports project which expands the list
of architectures supported by Ubuntu, which, admittedly has been much
smaller than the Debian list.  They've released Ubuntu (with some
subsetting of packages) for IA64, HPPA, and UltraSparc.
http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/45211/

--
Rick DeNatale

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