Gentoo On Server Considered Harmful 372
Siker writes in to point out his blog post — Why Gentoo Shouldn't Be On Your Server — which seems to have stirred up a lot of discussion, including a thread on the Gentoo forums. From the post: "I firmly believe in updating server software only when you need to. If you don't need new features, and things are working, why change anything? If you update anything you will undoubtedly need to update configuration files. You will need to fix things that break in the upgrade process... This is hard with Gentoo. Gentoo wants you to change a lot of stuff. It wants to be bleeding edge."
This article makes good points. (Score:5, Insightful)
The promise of Gentoo for me is being able to continually upgrade and never get outside of that window of support.
I actually have a new shared user system that is running Gentoo that is kinda in beta right now. This article was very useful for me because it brings up those points about stability that concern me. Its kinda an experiment.
I think I may try Debian next.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
The Problem With Gentoo... (Score:5, Insightful)
Gentoo is only good for ricers, Gentoo is bleeding edge and unstable, Gentoo is only good for X deployment
The truth about Gentoo is that it is not really a distribution. Gentoo Linux does not make "releases" and it does not aim to cover one area of the market alone.
In Gentoo's packaging system, called portage, the aim is not only to provide up-to-the-minute packages (which it does) but also to provide a wide variety of both tested and verified "stable" packages as well as more bleeding-edge, testing packages.
This, along with a properly configured make.conf and /etc/portage file system, allows you to pull down the packages you want that have been verified as stable (and are also under watch by the Gentoo security project) and keep track of their libraries with revdep-rebuild.
Stop branding Gentoo with stereotypes that label it as X distribution, the project even calls itself a "metadistribution" capable of dropping into multiple roles.
*sigh* (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This article makes good points. (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is why IT Pros prefer Red Hat Linux or its unencumbered variants link CentOS, White Box, and Scientific. Better testing up front thanks to the Red Hat gang, and longer shelf life. Which is why most commercial software chooses to support it first, it provides a stable base.
Re:Some serious crack smoking... (Score:4, Insightful)
You've got to be kidding me... (Score:5, Insightful)
updates portage... Emerge flags include "--pretend", "--ask" and "--fetchonly" among several others, learn to
use them.
Re:Redhat 6.2 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:*sigh* (Score:2, Insightful)
to each their own (Score:4, Insightful)
- one can create a copy of the source files repository
- one can create a repository for self-compiled binary packages and install from there
- one can use the global repositories, and still get a stable version by restricting available packages by version
- finally, as others say, one can use the stable version.
Since the blogger seems to have missed these obvious ways, he hasn't read the documentation, and hence is not a competent administrator, hence his opinion is not very valuable.
Re:*sigh* (Score:3, Insightful)
Incidentally, I've run Gentoo for years on laptops, servers, you name it. I switched to Ubuntu about a year ago for desktops, but still use Gentoo on a server.
What I like about Ubuntu in particular is that every six months you can pretty much EXPECT all your packages, for the most part, to be updated to the most current stable versions. With Gentoo it's so much more haphazard. Yeah, Linux itself is haphazard...right, I know. With Gentoo, however, you're tied to the maintainer of the package deciding when a new version of application X is stable. Maybe there's some formalized internal process for this, but I don't know of one. So I remember waiting for MONTHS for the latest version of KDE or Firefox when other distros were actually shipping these same versions.
Yes, I know I can always just go unstable, but if you live on the unstable Gentoo crack too long, you'll OD sooner or later. No question about it. So I tried to stick stable, and wait and wait until finally a bug is fixed and our benevolent maintainer finally deems us worthy to receive. So even though it has a reputation of being bleeding edge, it's a lot more complicated than that.
Re:This article makes good points. (Score:4, Insightful)
Then one day we had to upgrade some of the services.. which in turn required lots of libraries to be upgraded.
In the end, we had to upgrade kernel.. cause libraries didnt support 2.4 kernel.
Stuff change too much in gentoo
How is it Gentoo's fault that the services you run require updated libraries? How is it Gentoo's fault that the libraries you use require a 2.6 kernel?
Seems to me the blame lies with the services and the libraries respectively, and performing the same upgrade would require the same kernel update on other distros too.
Re:It's a dirty job (Score:5, Insightful)
That is, unless you really dislike your customers that much, be they actual customers or other divisions in your business.
Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Any binary distribution has two modes of updates. One is an updated package within the same release; the other is a mass-update from one release to another. Gentoo combines the two, since the distinction is artificial. What you call "changing a lot of stuff" is merely keeping packages reasonably current so that you never have to do a mass-update or complete reinstall.
Anyone who considers the Gentoo update process too difficult either hasn't used Gentoo (upgrades are easy, and there aren't that many of them if you stick to stable x86) or has never dealt with package conflicts in binary distributions. That is the real horror I want to avoid, and I avoid it nicely by running Gentoo.
Updating (Score:3, Insightful)
It does NOT force you to do anything.
"You will need to fix things that break in the upgrade process..." Like what?
This past year there have been some major changes in the Linux world like:
glibc, gcc, xorg, apache(Gentoo went to the standard) and mysql are some the things I can think off of the top of my head.
Because of how Gentoo updates, big updates like these might break things if your not watching what your doing.
And if your blindly updating your system and overwriting confings when you do etc-update, its your own damm fault.
There comes a point in where a package is marked 'stable' for some distros, but if you look on the project site, its old and outdated.
http://gentoo-install.com/ [gentoo-install.com]
Thats the thing.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:This article makes good points. (Score:2, Insightful)
The stability of Gentoo on ANY system is user controlled. Period. Yes functioning hardware is first and foremost, but running a stable/unstable system is entirely set up by user config settings. Its THIS ability in Gentoo, that will determine just what software gets updated at what stage of their particular development.
I keep reading posts in here about constant updates, and bleeding edge, which in turn produce broken Databases, unstable systems etc. If people don't know how to properly Administer their Linux distro's and the software and applications they are running on them, they have no right to complain about the stability/instability of the distros THEY CHOOSE TO RUN.
If people want to complain about a particular program that is unstable or whose updates have caused instability on a system, there are places for that in the forums and on the dev lists. To write off an entire distro. because of individual user limitations and mismanagement is callous and juvenile. Proper Administration of Linux requires knowing each of your distro's limitations and benefits.
I run gentoo on servers, desktops, and notebooks; at work, and at home. Gentoo is the EASIEST distro to control, IMO. It allows me to run stable or unstable designations for my arch-type if I prefer. It allows me to update WHAT I WANT, WHEN I WANT. There is no GREATER control of Linux than that. Is there?
Gentoo is about one thing. Complete System Control. Every facet of it. If sys-admins aren't interested in THAT BENEFIT, I'd like to hear where you find it elsewhere.
Not anymore. (Score:5, Insightful)
I used Gentoo for several years. I learned an awful lot about Linux from it. And I appreciate the work that goes into it. But my servers run Debian now, for one reason - quick, reliable updates. I support several small businesses, I don't have the resources to maintain test environnments to check the impact of upgrades. And not having multiple powerful systems at many sites means distcc is not an option. And the recompiles occasionally necessary for apache or samba or postfix or mysql put an unreasonable strain on servers that are typically not high powered and are supporting multiple users. So for quick, reliable system updating apt-get beats emerge every time.
I'm not knocking gentoo. It's a great system for testing stuff, and evaluating software. But in the 3 minutes it took me to type this post, I could update 5 servers that hadn't been updated in a week.
Re:Debian stable (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a long-time Debian user, and I also think it's an ugly legacy UNIX thing. It's much better to have some sort of process supervisor that will restart crashed servers, and that will deal with dependencies in some sort of sane manner. The problem is that Debian is huge, and the amount of work required to switch to a new system would be almost equally as huge, but the benefits are comparatively small, so there's never been a push to change to something different.
The bright side of it is, like most of the advances Debian has made, when it finally does get replaced, it'll probably be replaced with something substantially better, because anything less would be unlikely to win the support of Debian's army of volunteers.
Re:This article makes good points. (Score:5, Insightful)
So in a way, yes, it is Gentoo's fault. It's just the way the distro is designed. Everything at the latest revisions possible. Great for a home system, not good for a server you have to maintain.
Re:I use to run Gentoo on a Personal Server (Score:3, Insightful)
I know that apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade (on Debian Stable) is unlikely to break anything. Testing is still prudent, but you know that nothing so insanely stupid as an incompatible database upgrade is going to occur. PHP4 and PHP5, for example, are separate packages in Debian. So are MySQL 4 and MySQL 5, Apache and Apache2, and any other package with significantly different versions. Running updates doesn't drastically change your environment. That's a good thing.
Never updating a server? (Score:3, Insightful)
I do agree that there are certain things you needn't update. A local server without a connection to any user you do not trust your data with (i.e. nobody but you, if you're smart) running on rock stable software that gets feature adds rather than bugfixes in new versions is a candidate for this. And for this server (singular, probably worldwide), the setup is ok.
Not updating a server connected to the internet is an invitation for hackers. No matter how "stable" or "solid" or "secure" a system is deemed to be at the moment of its compilation. Time and again there are bugs found in software that has been considered stable and safe for years. OpenSSH is hardly the most insecure application out there, and I would NOT want to see what happens to a server that does not update it.
And, last but not least, when you don't want to update Gentoo, you don't have to. It's fine and satisfied if you don't do an update sync. Actually, you reduce the workload of the servers if you don't.
So what the hell is this fuss about?
So? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll be more than happy to let the folks at Canoical, Red Hat, Novell, or wherever be the ones to put in several hours of work; I simply can't, at home, put in the hours required to maintain a "stable" system. When I quit using Gentoo a couple of years ago, it was to the point where I'd search the forums before I'd ever install a piece of software. And you know what? That gets old. Real old. Especially if you're sitting in front of what should be a desktop machine and you're waiting for revdep-rebuild to rebuild a couple dozen packages because libpng applied a non-backwards-compatible patch that fixed a major security flaw.
Sorry, kids, but although I can deal with running a Gentoo system, I choose to run Kubuntu 6.10. Not because I'm too much of a wuss to run Gentoo, or because I'm too stupid to run anything other than Ubuntu, but because I'd rather spend the hour or so of computer time I have at home some days getting pix and video of my adorable girl (now at toddler age) ready for the grandparents. Not glamorous, and doesn't help push the state of the art, but it's much more gratifying than, say (I'm making this one up), trying to chase down the ruby package maintainer to get him to apply a patch so that you can use Getopt::Long without having to edit files by hand.
Servers and compile yourself?? (Score:1, Insightful)
So how many of the bleeding edge proponents have to support more than 50 systems?
Package management, rpm, dpkg, all came out in response to the shortcomings of compile-yourself approach we can dearly remember from the days Slackware was about the only Linux distro.
I was there. I was the young sysadmin who had to support 2 Linux servers and who was excited by the performance gain I was supposed to get from compiling stuff yourself. In truth, I never noticed it - and I bet 90% of others don't notice it either and 9% see the gain there because they believe in it.
That was around 11 years ago. By the time Gentoo came out I was dealing with RPMs and blessing them.
Nowadays package management software on SuSE, Ubuntu or others even lets you upgrade running system to next release while running.
Do I want to spend hours of my time tweaking compile parameters and wondering why some of them don't work? Do I need "bleeding edge" or stability? For production systems my answer is clear. Yes, there will cases when you want to squeeze the top speed out of the system, so it is good that something like Gentoo is there, too. But I am fairly certain those cases are rare, and in majority of them an upgraded piece of hardware is usually required in the end.
Production / Test / QA / Development Environments (Score:2, Insightful)
What happened to backups anyway?
Re:You've got to be kidding me... (Score:2, Insightful)
This has been a fairly common response, and I agree in principle - I'd love never having to run that command. But like others [gentoo.org] have pointed out [slashdot.org], this proves to be hard in the long run.
I don't disagree with the opinion that had I known much more about Gentoo, perhaps I would have been able to eliminate more things from the system and thus update fewer packages. But do keep in mind that the intended audience of the article is people who are considering to use Gentoo for a server - not people who are already professional Gentoo users.
These new users will only be able to rely on what the manual tells them. Here's what the manual [gentoo.org] has to say about it:
If this doesn't mean what it says, I apologize, but do consider that every other new Gentoo administrator may be liable to think the same thing I did.
I stuck my head in the sand and I got run over... (Score:4, Insightful)
Quote: "If you don't need new features, and things are working, why change anything?"
Translation: "Never change a working system."
Quote: "...I ran the dreaded but most needed "emerge world"..."
Translation: "My system worked but I updated everything"
Quote: "I had nearly no idea of what I was updating..."
Translation: "I didn't bother to check what was going to change"
Quote: "I tried to read the enormous emerge log file..."
Translation: "I didn't bother to read the log file about what had changed"
Quote: "...the machine had to be resuscitated..."
Translation: "I changed it, it doesn't work anymore and I can't be bother to read the documentation"
Basically, he made a bad choice for his environment. Horses for courses.
Not at all (Score:5, Insightful)
But on the stable branch, I've actually been very surprised with how
As for the points the author raised against Gentoo:
1) Too long to do initial install.
This one gives it away from the start. You only install once. But this is at the top of the list. I can't remember how long it took me to install Gentoo on this server, but it was probably 2 days or something. Who cares? That's what time I take installing *any* server. You don't just whack it together and put it into production. You install, you read, you test, you frig around some more. What's wrong with that? The author is no server administrator.
2) Same as point one, just repeated
WTF? Seriously, this author has his head up his arse. On the one hand, he later says that you shouldn't update willy-nilly on servers, and yet then says that it takes ages to update everything. So what, exactly, is he trying to achieve? It takes me about 10 - 15 minutes to update MySQL, which is the most common package I update. What's wrong with that? I back things up, shut down MySQL, emerge the new MySQL package, test, and import form backups if required. No problem? Where is this guy's problem, seriously?
3) Don't like updates, even if they are to more stable packages
Nothing forces you to update packages. Also, no-one claims that packages updates *won't* break things ( though my experience is that in the stable branch, updates *don't* break things ). But if you don't want to update, don't. No problem. If you do want to update, the tools are there to update easily. Sure you should pay attention to what you're doing. It goes without saying.
4) Same as point 3, but with the update impetus being security instead of stablity
Doesn't deserve a response really.
I challenge this author to prove that he's actually used Gentoo Linux for more than 7 days without running crying back to Linspire.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This article makes good points. (Score:5, Insightful)
I run Gentoo on my own machine, and most of my users WANT bleeding edge versions, a lot of custom options here and there. The system is using a hardened kernel, stack protection and everything is compiled for 64bit (k8). I don't know of any distros that can do that for every package. So far I have had 1 package problem, and that was resolved by 'uncaching' some stuff and redo the emerge of that package. In general, gentoo is easy to maintain, provided you update regularly. As for the people whining about compile times, this is a server, using it at 100% cpu now and then, provided the compilation has a low priority impacts noone. Compiler time is a non-issue, i'm not running X, soundcards, usb, video drivers, gui-browsers etc, there's not all that much to upgrade.
It should be noted that I sync the portage tree from a euro-mirror to a local mirror 6 times a day, and having 3-4 meg a sec to the files-repository makes downloads take an average of 2-3 seconds. Coupled with two beefy processors and lots of ram, Gentoo is brilliant for me. And yes, I have permission from the rsync-maintainer to synch that often.
Re:This article makes good points. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes new patches come out all the time, but the real question is whether you trust developers to improve their code over time, or to destroy it. We've seen one end of the spectrum with what MS did between 98 and ME, and I believe that gentoo shows us the other end. While you theoretically always ARE at the bleeding edge with Gentoo, it does have a "safe window" built in, the way it handles portage with the keyword system. New packages are usually in CVS within 48 hours of release. If they compile and run, they get thrown into the ~arch (testing) rapidly. Then, depending on what kind of update has been done on it, you'll have to wait anywhere from 2 days to 5 months to see it come down into the actual arch repository, which is deemed the "stable" gentoo. I personally run ~arch, yet I can't seem to recall a problem that portage couldn't solve with minimum input on my part.
Yes, I'm a gentoo fanboy, but I'm not so glued down into distro patriotism to refuse to see flaws where they are.
Some people seem to want to spend time in maintenance to keep a system up to date and continually tinker and let their knowledge grow by frequent maintenance, and other people seem more interested in setting something up and being lazy about having to deal with updates/upgrades. I personally trust that most open source coders, and especially the ones for the big projects like apache, ssh, mysql and others of that caliber, usually improve the code from release to release, not damage it. Security fixes, bug fixes, and plain new features are usually the goal of coders, and I trust that they do that.
Re:I use to run Gentoo on a Personal Server (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I use to run Gentoo on a Personal Server (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no such thing as "Gentoo Version 3" or whatever. A package is marked stable after it is deemed to be... well, stable. Gentoo does have a mechanism whereby you can ask it to tell you what it proposes to update before it actually goes away and does it (emerge -p), and on any system this is exactly what you should use to make sure you're not trying to do a major update on your database.
The one issue here (and it's open to debate whether or not it's an issue) is that portage is designed with a more traditional Unix mindset - a mindset which says "the operator knows best, if they're telling the computer to do something then the computer should do it unless it's physically impossible, regardless of how silly it may seem".
ametures. (Score:2, Insightful)
Gentoo is great.
Gentoo is wonderful.
*IF* you're only administrating a small handful of servers.
When you have to look out for a few HUNDRED machines at a time, you **reaaaally** start to appreciate things like calendar based release cycles, binary packages, uniformity, hardware compatibility lists, repository mirroring, etc.
Gentoo is far too schizophrenic to be a reliable environment for n servers, especially in a "real" scenario.
Academically, Gentoo is a wonderful system.... but its one of those things that works "great on paper" but sucks a lot of ass in Real Life. Trust me, you have better things to do than worry about than whether or not upgrading one package for a minor security fix will drag along your system libs and userland utils with it. If this is the sort of thing you concern yourself with on a day to day basis, you're doing something WRONG.
Large environment management is a constant battle with entropy.
Hard drives die, switches fail, nics go bad, boards burn out, storage space fills up, and all this has to be dealt with. Using predictable, understandable, documented, tested and supported systems creates One Less Thing to worry about.
An entire IT staff should not have to be briefed on a daily basis about what the Gentoo Administrator decided to include in his(her?) build flags.
-s
Re:I use to run Gentoo on a Personal Server (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, it sounds like you're blaming Gentoo for something that is MySQL's fault. (Assuming that the format was changed, and not just the db dir location). It's probably because you went from 3.x to 4.x or similar.
Re:Bukd your own binaries (Score:3, Insightful)
Real production environments, at least at the enterprise level, are built around stable, well tested binary packages that just work, change control processes, updates that can be applied safely with minimal technical skill and minimal configuration work, environments which may have one sysadmin for every 500 servers. Server builds should be able to be left to operations staff instead of sysadmins without fear of things going wrong.
Gentoo's strategy of bleeding edge continuous upgrades also doesn't fly in the enterprise world, which insists, for good reason, that functionality shouldn't change at all in production environments except as dictated by the organization's needs. This means that patches have to be back ported, release cycles are a requirement, and product support lifecycles are expected to be measured at least in months, preferably years. Functionality changes require a different kind of risk assessment and planning mentality in the business datacenter world than they do in the workstation world, and this is even more so with laws on the books regulating IT controls such as section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley act. [wikipedia.org]and HIPPA [wikipedia.org] in the US alone, and extensive data protection laws in other countries.
Not to mention, the difficulty of one person rolling back changes to 500 servers in an environment built on everything compiled from source is a huge drawback.
While I think that Gentoo is a tremendous technical achievement, it's design places it firmly in the hobbyist and developer workstation realm, and I strongly agree with the article that this leaves it no place in the datacenter for anything other than development work.
Re:Bukd your own binaries (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want something that you know isn't going to change much, and certainly never in a way that breaks anything, use Debian Stable -- and be prepared to build the odd package from source {it really isn't as bad as it's made out to be} if you have to have a massively up-to-date version of something. They have a more-than-King-size package repository.
This whole argument is trivially debunked (Score:3, Insightful)
This is trivial to do, and leads me to suspect the person putting forward the argument against using Gentoo (or any other well-engineered distribution) on servers either has an agenda, hasn't taken much time to ponder the issue, or doesn't understand the technology.
Re:So? (Score:3, Insightful)
OK, you're a jerk ;)
Sure, kubuntu is great on a desktop, but how does that relate to the article, running Gentoo on a sever? Gentoo lends itself quite nicely to a server environment. Personally any server I've run in the past 4 years has run Gentoo. I've run others before and I've tired others since. I've come to realize that the initial time you spend building a Gentoo server (minus compile time) is about equivalent to the amount of time I've had to spend going back to customize things I didn't like about default install from other, binary based, distros. Even if it does take longer, setting up a sever should.
You *must* do controlled, conservative refreshes. (Score:3, Insightful)
There are two kinds of "broke", there are gaps in functionality
Case in point. The company I work for is in a mad dash to upgrade for the DST time change. And for those of you thinking "duh, you just upgrade your timezone files"... no it's not that easy. Some Sun systems require firmware upgrades, almost all of the systems prior to 2005 require binary updates because they can't handle a timezone that has two rulesets (e.g. they would apply the new 2007 rules to timestamps from 2005), most JVM's have to be patched or upgraded and some applications inexplicably do their own calculations and have to be update as well.
The majority of the company has the "if it ain't broke" mentality and were running everything from NT 4.0 on DEC Alpha's and Sun 2.4 to Windows 2003 64-bit and Solaris 10. Upgrading the older machines is an absolute nightmare because the vendor patches are built one, two even three years worth of patches that we haven't applied. What should be a relatively simple upgrade task has broken applications all over the place and has our QA and Engineering staff bleary eyed and ready for it all to just end.
The answer is controlled refresh. Twice a year you sync up your servers with a certain patchset. You don't go crazy... you just get vendor required patches and include them in your dev and qa cycles. And you DO NOT USE EOL OS' in an enterprise environment. Ever. This includes commercial and FOSS packages.
Full Disclosure : I run two gentoo boxes at my house my workstation and my mythtv box. I patch them about once a week because I like to tinker. My web/file/mysql server is running on a stripped down Debian system that only gets patched every few months or if there is an advisory that comes out.
Re:Not if you're using Debian (Score:5, Insightful)
Many itadmins and most developers have a problem with understanding of the "establish a platform and build on it" and "platform freeze before development" ideas. They think that everything is a fair game and the results (in man hours wasted on piecing everything together for release) are usually quite obvious.
Re:This article makes good points. (Score:3, Insightful)
on the contrary, this article makes NO good points. First of all, he is using old hardware and then he complains about the time it takes to compile packages. Duh. Slow computer + large packages like Apache and MySQL = a lot of time spent compiling. The writer talks about the inital install taking a long time. Yes, my first time installing Gentoo using the CLI took a long time, too, because I was spending more time reading the documentation than performing the steps. The documentation is stupendous, btw. Now that I have gone through a few installs, I can pretty much do it all on my own, but I still refer to the Quick Install Guide [gentoo.org] for reference. He then complains about the Stage 3 install losing the "compile everything" mentality. Wrong again, because the nature of Gentoo is that as you change USE flags and packages get updated, then the base system will naturally update itself. So, the Stage 3 install simply removes a lot of initial compiling to get you in to a base system quicker. The author then complains about Gentoo wanting you to upgrade everything all of the time and not being stable. Wrong again. You perform an initial `emerge -vauDN world` to update the base system to your new, custom USE flags. Once you install packages and you only want to keep specfic packages up to date, you only need to update that package using `emerge -vau package` (v is verbose, a is ask, both are good so you know exactly what is going on, but not essential). And, as a lot of other people have pointed out, if you do not use the unstable keywords, you will be on a very stable system. Also, no config files will be overwritten unless you tell them to be. The `etc-update` program shows you what needs to be updated, and allows you to merge, overwrite, or ignore the updates. He then says "Gentoo wants you to change a lot of stuff. It wants to be bleeding edge." This is also false. Gentoo wants you to do whatever you want to on your own system. It wants to be as current as you want it to be. Gentoo is all about control and knowing your system.
Obviously, the author has used Gentoo once and now believes he is an expert on the subject. If he had used it more than once, he would see that all of his arguments hold no weight. Every distribution has their own way of doing things, and when you change from one to the other, it takes time to learn the new procedures.
and for the record, I tried to install Debian Woody on my pentium 133 laptop. It took an entire 7 days to download and update the base system. And that was a full 7 days of straight work. Thus, I decided to pick a distribution that was more appropriate for the system and settled on DSL. Also, I switched to Gentoo from Slackware on my server because I always found my self reading the Gentoo documentation for help in setting things up on Slackware, and I like the FreeBSD-esque package manager (Portage is based on Ports). Personally, I would always choose a BSD in a production environment. "BSD on the server; Linux on the desktop," as the old addage goes.
Re:some truth, but for many Gentoo is appropriate (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with USE flags is that every Gentoo build environment is __too__ unique. With FreeBSD, everyone is running, debugging, and fixing the same stuff. Consequently, most of the ports build & work together out of the box.
I've come to the conclusion that Gentoo is solving a problem that plagued the OSS community in the '90s.
Major 'server' software is usually known stable within a month of its release and is usually incorporated into FreeBSD ports with a corresponding lag--except when driven by security issues. The mentality is that everything in ports should 'work'. Instability and brokenness is frowned upon and not excused by allowing somethings to be classified as unstable. When differences of opinion exist about versions (e.g., firefox15 and firefox2) the name space is split, but this is only tolerated when people genuinely disagree as to which is better.
In the end: FreeBSD => less choice. Less choice => more consistency. More consistency => easier administration.
Obviously there can be too little choice at some extreme, but generally FreeBSD saves admin time by adopting some degree of simplicity and uniformity.
Re:Some serious crack smoking... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's just not trendy to knock on Slackware, so everyone targets Gentoo.
Some people also love to ignore advances that are made. The article mentions how long it took to install Gentoo. He claims that there was not an installer when he performed his installation more than a year ago. This is false. There was an installer, but it was considered experimental. Since then, the installer has become the de facto installation method on x86/amd64 and will be the default method on other architectures as support is added for them.
As for updates, who in the world out there has a ton of servers, then compiles on all of them? What is this guy smoking and where can I get some? Does he not realize that you can upgrade only what you want? There's nothing forcing you to upgrade the entire system. Hell, there's nothing forcing you to ever update the portage tree on your servers.
Any place where I'm ending up with more than one or two Gentoo boxes, I setup a local "master" server. This server will host my portage tree, which I don't update. It will also host my overlay. I update packages and add my own packages in this overlay. I build binary packages on this "master" server and distribute them to my servers. This really isn't a hard concept. It also isn't much different than the sort of thing that any sane administrator would do with any distribution. You don't just blindly run Red Hat updates, do you?
I think the biggest problem here is one of perception. People seem to ignore that when you buy Red Hat/SuSE, you are buying a product. You're buying support and service. With Gentoo, you're "buying" a toolset and nothing more. It's the difference between buying a car, and getting a bunch of parts and tools. They simply aren't comparable. If you want a nice Gentoo server infrastructure, you have to build it!
Gentoo has projects, such as the Scire project [gentoo.org], which are designed to create a more enterprise-ready management set for Gentoo. However, this will not be a default for Gentoo, since few of our users would need it. Like everything else with Gentoo, you pick what you want from the tools provided, and you customize and tailor it to fit your needs. This entire article reads like a rant from someone who chose a tool because of its properties, then complained about those exact properties. You don't get to bitch when the "do-it-yourself" distribution asks you to do it yourself. ;]
Re:The Problem With Gentoo... (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh? We assume no such thing. In fact, we really don't care what "most people" want, at all. We make no assumptions about support. It is Gentoo detractors who tend to claim that we do. We don't. What we care about is making Gentoo. If Gentoo doesn't fit your needs, don't friggin' use it! Trust me, you won't hurt our feelings. If you think Debian is better, use it. If you think Windows is better, use it. You aren't harming us in any way by using what you feel is the best tool for the job. In fact, that is exactly what we try to give to our users. We give them a set of tools to allow them to build what they want.
I think the biggest issue is that people seem to have this closed-minded view of software and Gentoo. They're stuck in this way of thinking that lends towards doing what the vendor tells you to do. They run Red Hat. They run Debian. They don't think that you can build what you want. Gentoo provides the tools to do just that. For many of my clients, I have built custom Gentoo-based distributions. What they get themselves is slightly different than Gentoo. They get pre-compiled packages. They get a very nice Internet-based update system for these packages. They don't jump into make.conf, at all. They don't need to make these kind of changes. Instead, I have built a custom distribution with the software that the customer wants on it. They install it from CD, and it has exactly what they want on it and nothing else. Gentoo is the tool that builds this system. I am using Gentoo as it was intended, to build exactly what I want. People tend to forget that it is impossible to make something that fits every need. Rather than try to do so, like other distributions do, we instead provide the tools to allow you to build it on your own. It's a completely different philosophy, which is why I understand that so many people simply don't get it.