Tan, Stephen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > At the risk of having someone flame me, I'm not sure I'd run Gentoo on > Corporate desktops or servers. I don't think that it's stable enough for a > production environment. > > (Having had 2 occasions in the past 6 months that I have been running Gentoo > where portage/emerge related issues have hosed (a) gcc and (b) libstdc++.so, > I'll stand by that statement!) > > I have Gentoo running on my desktop here at work and at home, but the real > production machines are Debian. Debian's stable really is stable! Gentoo is > nifty and extremely cool but is prone to nasty emerge issues such as the > ones I have just noted.
I have to agree with you here. I'm currently using gentoo on production servers (webservers, database servers, and a couple of others (dns/mail/etc) I love gentoo, but in a corporate environment there are a few problems. Gentoo is a cutting edge distribution. If you stick with stable, you're generally ok, but even then (as mentioned above) you aren't immune to problems that can crop up. Myself, I've made my own custom setup that keeps a custom portage overlay around with the package versions I want to use. I just copy over the new ones I want as they come out from the real portage tree whenever I want to update. But this is an extra bit of administration. It's no big deal to me, neither is adjusting dependencies in the overlay to avoid upgrading other packages unnecessarily. However, I'm not the rule when it comes to admins. In my experience, the unix sysadmin field is fairly flooded with barely competant to completely incompetant people. For every true admin I meet, I meet 2 that couldn't tell me the difference between NIS and NFS. In addition, most commercial applications tend to lag behind in development. I have several that just plain won't run on gentoo 1.4 because they haven't gotten around to rebuilding it on the newer glibc yet. That's a real pain. It's not gentoo's fault, it's the curse of using closed source applications, but we don't always have a choice in these matters. It's unfortunate that there's no compat library for the 2.2 glibc. Because of these things, we'll probably be switching to redhat advanced server when the next version is released. It makes me ill to think of all the work it's going to take to clean those servers up, and rewrite/rebuild all those packages so they make sense and don't have all those stupid dependancies....but in the end, if I get hit by a bus they'll have a much easier time finding someone else competant enough to keep the servers running that way than if I left it the way it is now. I love this distribution, and it'll probably stay on some of the servers (monitoring) that are not commercial software dependant, and are not mission-critical, but the rest will switch. It'll be a sad day. :-( -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
