On Sat, 2003-03-15 at 20:17, Ulf Kister wrote: > Hi there, > > after playing around with gentoo linux and having come to like it I > seriosly consider migrating a pool of servers to gentoo at > work.
Use with care and initiative. Gentoo although highly versatile and featureful is young. This is not in any way critical but careful preconsideration will later prevent comments in scorn of the distribution. > Production requirements are given, downtime is a no-go. > > I would love to use FreeBSD for it's stability and performance, but > in the list of systems which support Java (List? What list? :-) > FreeBSD does'nt appear and the opportunity to test the latest and > greatest <java-related-buzzword> is a must. > > So gentoo, which seems close to FreeBSD from the administrators point > of view (no flame war please :-). > > Only some three things make me hesitate: > > 1. I have not yet understood how some - definitely important - config > files are kept in sync. Look at /etc/make.profile/packages. qpkg > seems not to find a port which claims ownership to this file, > nonetheless it *is* important - and especially important to be kept > up to date. Current configuration files are protected and not overwritten when newer versions of packages are installed either manually or through an update. At the end of installations it shall warn you of outstanding configuration files. Then you may deal with them using 'etc-update'. Please note that qpkg is part of gentoolkit which is an unofficial set of utilities provided for convenience and is not included in portage. Files relating exclusively to portage and their permissions are kept optimal by the 'emerge sync' process without need of user intervention. > 2. I use vanilla sources 2.4.20. OK, from gentoo's viewpoint this is > just a port like many others, no prob with that. Only the header > files, which I believed to be redundant, are nailed down to > "=sys-kernel/linux-headers-2.4.19" in the mentioned file. Any > attempt to use no headers at all or at least the version > corresponding to my kernel version failed. What gives? > > 3. Recently the shiny and new gentoo 1.4 rc3 version was > released. From FreeBSD I'm used to decently ignore any > announcements like this, because frequntly syncing the source tree > and rebuilding/installing kernel/world reliably provided me the > most current version of the "STABLE"-development branch. That's exactly the way Gentoo works. There are two trees: stable and unstable which you may choose from and can mix and match between them too. The installer you use to create the system is insignificant as essentially the entire system including base and additional packages can be manipulated and filtered by the central portal to it all called portage. Nevertheless, with every new release of the installation cd considerable improvements are realised and would certainly provide greater benefit and convenience than older versions. For example, the new RC3 basic cd offers the option of cdcache which caches the entire 46MB cd into memory and improved autodetection of hardware to mention a few. The system may be kept up to date using the following progressive commands depending on which you prefer to carry out. Proxies can be configured and there is also a socks5 use flag for applications. emerge -u system emerge -u world emerge -u --deep world Best wishes. Dhruba Bandopadhyay. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
