Rich Freeman schrieb:
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.
Every three months is not infrequently.
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.
Seriously, update every day?
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 seems better suited when you want to use ZFS and doesn´t come with
as much bloat as Centos or Debian, and I don´t want systemd.
Besides, the installer Centos comes with failed to partition the disks, and I
didn´t have time and wasn´t inclined to mess with that. Both Centos and Debian
can leave you with rather ancient software, and Centos might not be updatable
at all. On top of that, Debian left users stranded with non-working systems
with their brokenarch and no fix in sight, at which time I replaced it after
over 15 years of using it, and it became deprecated. If it wasn´t for that,
I wouldn´t use Gentoo or consider Centos.
So after all, Gentoo seemed the least-bad choice with some arguments for it.
Now it turns out that you can´t update it without running into problems all
the time, and currently not at all.
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.
This is an entirely different issue: Does the new version of the software
work? It´s beside the point, which is: Is the distribuiton updateable?
Gentoo and Fedora don´t classify as updateable, and since Fedora doesn´t,
Centos doesn´t either (even only the latest version of Centos claims to be
probably updateable, previous versions weren´t at all). Debian used to be
updateable, yet the leaps were so big that you were better off running testing
all the time to avoid them until it became too messed up.
Unfortunately, that doesn´t really leave any good choices. And what is the
advantage of Gentoo supposed to be when you can´t even update it to be able to
do your testing to see if it works?
