Constant and needless updating servers is the exact opposite of "stable". Server stability equates to money in almost all business, IMHO. Why on earth would I risk my stability on a daily basis by emerging world? Remember that the ONLY reason to upgrade a server is if there is discernable benefit. The benefit may be a security fix, bug fix, supportability, enhancement, or it just looks cooler -- that's for the user/benefactor(s) to decide.
By default, Portage doesn't lend itself to this. I don't need/want the latest Postgres just because it's available, especially when the upgrade would require data and/or app migration. Upgrades warrant testing. I can't justify spend hundreds of man-hours testing all available apps on a given system just because some program went from v4.3 to 4.3-1. I also can't justify upgrading just because Gentoo no longer wants to keep last year's ebuild around. Thankfully, a sysadmin can make use of OVERLAY and rsync (*without* "--delete"!) to create their own portage tree, complete with all the old rebuilds. Anyone that's tried to upgrade an old OpenSSH knows what happens on the ensuing revdep-rebuild -- ebuilds are gone, and you're stuck in the mud. RedHat is stable. It's also a PITA to maintain for some business apps. Building Oracle on RedHat requires arcane incantations and animal sacrifice. But doing the same on Gentoo is the same as any flavor of Unix. So, I use RedHat in production, but Gentoo on my R&D desktop. But that doesn't mean I don't need stability. Any major libs get changed and I need to relink Oracle. Then I need to wonder what changed and how to test it. It's just not worth the hassle for almost all updates for me. I'm way short on time and way too terse here. This is the kinda stuff that needs to be debated over copius amounts of really freakin good beer. My $.02, Rich -----Original Message----- From: Alex Efros [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2006 6:30 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [gentoo-server] Stable portage tree Hi! On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 11:00:21AM +0100, Ian P. Christian wrote: > Updating every 6/12 months is fine in principle, but it means going > though 10's of machines updating config files and resolving conflics. > This is a painful task, it's fine for 1 machine, it's fine for 5... but > you have any real number of servers to maintain and it ends up taking > hours or days to upgrade your servers. Yeah, your right. But there simple solution for this: update your servers every 3-4 days, and you will be surprised how ease and quick this task become. You'll need from a couple of seconds to 2-3 minutes in average for such update! Usually a few not important for you applications will be updated, which can't broke anything on your server, and which require few seconds to update their config files. Sometimes one of applications critical for your server become updated, and this require more attention, but it's much better to update ONE such important application instead of updating ALL of such important applications every 6-12 month. And this way you always can ease fallback to previous version of this application if something goes wrong on your server, add broken (for you) version to /etc/portage/package.mask, report bug and wait for next update. I've tried all these ways of updating my servers in last 2 years: update every few days, update only security issues, update every 6-12 months and found first way much more ease, effective and manageable than others. With two other ways I also wanna 'stable portage tree', with first way I don't need it - ARCH=x86 IS A 'stable portage tree' for me now. :) -- WBR, Alex. -- [email protected] mailing list -- [email protected] mailing list
