Gentoo advantage? (was: [TriLUG] What distro do you use AT WORK on your SERVERS.)

[Myrhillion]

Actually, gentoo also has another method that is meant more like 
debian's   stable, testing (I think.. never have run debian just talk so 
not positive about this)..

You can set in your make.conf  your architecture to x86, this gives 
"production/stable" release versions of the software.
If you want the hottest released ebuilds, you can change it globally to 
~x86.

If you want specific packages to be newer and maintain other software as 
production, you can set it in /var/portage/package.mask (or something), 
don't have access to my gentoo atm for exact path.  You basically list 
the ebuild   app-misc/f-spot ~x86   and then "emerge f-spot".

If you're using x86 and there is only a ~x86 version available as an 
ebuild, it is listed as masked and won't install if you run "emerge 
app_name".

I had stuck with production on my laptop since 2002 when I first 
installed gentoo (haven't reinstalled yet) on my dell inspiron 8100.
I have had some issues with gcc updates and kernel recompiles, such that 
were a bit thorny over profile changes though, nothing insurmountable 
with a little time.
I have slowly allowed some ~x86 ebuilds in namely,  mono and nvidia 
related ebuilds.

That said, my laptop is not "production".  I dink around on it, and run 
it in linux when I can (dual boot xp).

Doug Taggart


Owen Berry wrote:

>I think in Gentoo the stability of the package depends to a large extent
>on the maintainer of the package. Since it is a continuously evolving
>distribution, with no releases in the traditional sense, there is no
>centralized group testing and releasing packages. Once a maintainer
>feels that a new release is ready, out it goes.
>
>I would disagree that Gentoo is notorious for releasing changes that
>break things (I've had very few problems), but I would say that you
>should be more cautious than with other distros when in a production
>environment. When a major release happens for a package, I sometimes
>wait for a few days before putting it in. This lets the dust settle
>while everyone else sorts out any problems ... with such a configurable
>system things are bound to be different amongst users, potentially
>causing problems for some.
>
>Also, if you can't afford downtime, I would suggest more than one
>system, where you can build, install and test on one system, and then
>install on the others. This way you can also build binary packages,
>making it easier to revert to the older version, and avoid compiling on
>all machines.
>
>Things I like about Gentoo are it's excellent documentation (I sometimes
>refer to it even when working on other distros, if applicable), the
>range of packages, the ability to install bleeding edge packages, and
>the flexibility. Sometimes Ubuntu tempts me though. :-)
>
>Another thing I like is that CPAN modules can be incorporated into
>your portage tree. Instead of having an ebuild for every Perl module on
>CPAN, there's a script that does a certain amount of integration between
>CPAN and portage, helping keep everything consistent. It drives me crazy
>having a mix of RPM's and CPAN on RedHat systems.
>
>Owen
>
>On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 09:15:47AM -0500, William Sutton wrote:
><snip>
>  
>
>>I don't think it is a production system.  Gentoo is notorious for 
>>releasing changes without doing thorough testing (google for the apache 
>>1.series to apache 2.series breakages), for example.
>>
>>On the whole it has a place, and installing a few Gentoo systems is a good 
>>learning experience...I just wouldn't run one in production.
>>    
>>
></snip>
>  
>