On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 10:08 AM, hw <h...@gc-24.de> wrote: > > I infrequently update Gentoo because I´m *always* running into problems > like this. 'Infrequently' means about every 3 months at home, and not > since, IIRC, 2015-02 here at work. The last update at home got stalled > because perl cannot be updated, and I haven´t had the time to look into > that to finish it.
You're probably always running into problems like this because you infrequently update Gentoo. If you ran it every day you'd probably only run into issues every couple of months, and when you did you'd have it immediately narrowed down to a few packages since that is all that has changed. > > If you say that you need to update more frequently than every 3 months > for not to have problems with the update process itself, I can only > conclude that Gentoo is entirely unsuited for servers --- and for home > use as well other than for test machines perhaps. > If you're looking for a distro designed to just work with no hands-on, then you should probably look elsewhere. Put it another way, why are you using Gentoo instead of Debian or CentOS in the first place? Gentoo is useful when you want to mess with the configuration of the distro itself, not when you just want to throw a few files in /var/www/htdocs and be done with it. Gentoo can be made to work rather well on servers, but you have to know what you're doing. You can't just run emerge -u world on a production server that hasn't been touched in a year and expect to work. However, you certainly could set up your own local repository, pull in updates as needed (certainly including frequent security updates), build binary packages and deploy to your test environment, make sure everything is good, and then deploy those binary packages to your production servers. You can accomplish a lot of things that way that you couldn't accomplish with CentOS or Debian. However, if all you want is the same binaries Debian already gives you, then just run Debian. It isn't like apache runs better just because you compiled it yourself. Gentoo is about tweaking things. And if you're going to tweak things in an enterprise environment then you need to be doing QA. If you really want to be deploying updates into production without any testing then you ought to stick with the likes of CentOS/RHEL. That's basically their entire value-add. Debian stable would be another option. -- Rich
