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

[Ian Kilgore]

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Myrhillion wrote:
| 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
|

Having used various versions of gentoo (x86, ~x86) and Debian (stable,
testing, unstable) I think I can say 'x86 is to ~x86 as stable is to
testing (or unstable)' is just not true (I doubt x86 was meant to be a
parallel of Debian stable.  Maybe testing).  x86 is certainly more
stable than ~x86, but its really not the rock hard 'never touch this no
really don't breathe on it' that Debian stable is =]
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