I can only agree with Mark, I use Gentoo extensively at home, and love it. But at work (Telco environment) I wouldn't recommend it, there we go with Red Hat Linux (surprise surprise ;-) ) when it comes to Linux, otherwise we're using HP-Unix and Sun Solaris extensively.
Personally I'd prefer for a server environment Debian which for a company got a stable and long release cyclus (even though it's nowhere as flexible as Gentoo....) It's basically all boils down to production stability and knowing your environment from a to z. --Robert On Tuesday 15 May 2007 19:13, Mark Rudholm wrote: > Andrew Gaffney wrote: > > A. Khattri wrote: > >> I have no problem with change as long as there is an easy way to keep > >> what > >> we have. After all, Gentoo is about having a choice and removing the > >> apache flag from PHP without providing some other mechanism to keep it > >> is simply removing choice. > > > > I see this type of argument used all the time. Some people just don't > > seem to get the fact that all Gentoo devs are volunteers, and we will do > > whatever makes it easier on *us*. If you don't like it, don't bitch > > about choice. You have the *choice* to learn how to maintain the stuff > > yourself and not complain. You don't pay for Gentoo, so you don't have > > the right to tell any Gentoo dev what to do with their volunteer > > time.</rant> > > If people are using this argument all the time, it might be > worth considering why they are. > > Gentoo tends to remove packages or change them in a way that > is not rearward-compatible more readily than other distributions. > I understand that the labor is all volunteer, however, other, > more stable/mature distributions are also all-volunteer, but yes, > that's the way it is. People spend their volunteer time as they > see fit, I understand this completely. > > The result, however, is that Gentoo becomes an inappropriate > choice for a production server deployment. I haven't suggested > Gentoo for production servers to anyone (especially my employers) > since somewhere around 2003 for this reason. > > At work, my team of a few dozen people support tens of thousands > of Linux servers. We wrote our own tools for installation, > distribution, and maintenance of OSes and package sets. There was > a time when I considered that we could use Gentoo. Our own custom > Portage repositories could be maintained, and the portage tools > would cover a lot of the things we need to do very nicely. It'd > be great to build on the work of other Gentoo contributors, and > we'd no doubt join the larger community of contributors. But I > simply can't recommend this. The Gentoo developers and packagers > in general seem more interested in the latest shiny thing rather > than stability, reliability, and predictability. Fine for a desktop, > but antithetical to the needs of people running mission-critical > server farms. As you point out, it's entirely the prerogative of > the developers and packagers to set their own priorities, and I > agree of course, but do be aware of the results of the choices of > Gentoo packagers and developers and how they collectively create > the personality of the distro and how that personality effects the > choices of other potential contributors and users of Gentoo Linux. > > -Mark (who uses Gentoo on his personal systems these days) -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
