On Sunday 07 May 2006 11:31 JimD was like: > Or stick with xorg-7 and don't do all the little updates? If i have a > working package, I won't do an update unless the *package* changes. For > example I wouldn't update a working foo-1.0-r1 to foo-1.0-r2. I would > (probably) do an update to foo-1.0.1 or something. > > The approach I have learned to take with Gentoo is to keep my important > apps stable. I don't update courier or postfix often. I will go and > see what the update does and if it is something I need. If it is a > minor update that corrects handling of Chinese characters during a full > moon, I won't grab it. I keep gnome at the latest official stable > version. For apps that are beta quality, I keep those that the latest > version. For example I unmask and use the latest monodevelop. > > Gentoo can be a very nice stable system or a > pulling-out-your-hair-why-did-I-do-that-upgrade system. Pick which one > you want :)
One problem with gentoo is that there is no easy way to distinguish a security-related upgrade from something less important. It's not a problem you get with SuSE or Ubuntu. This is one of the reasons why I have just gone along with whatever emerge -avu world threw my way, though, as it happens, the xorg update that caused me all this trouble was just such a security update. The problem seems to have ironed itself out now, after two upgrades and one rollback, but it was not nice to have a non-functioning system for a few hours. And I got a pretty useless response to my bug report. Generally I am finding administering gentoo way too time-consuming, while the theoretical benefits in terms of performance are not materialising. For instance I am sure that with a lot more tweaking I can get great low-latency performance, but I am beginning to think that I would be better off simply changing distro to Demudi or Fedora/Planet CCRMA and getting the low-latency stuff pre-packaged and ready to roll. Perhaps it might be useful to build glibc and a few other libraries from source, but do I really need to build gimp from source when I don't use it that much? I think it's time I stopped spending all my time tweaking and troubleshooting my system and actually got some work done. That said, the plus side to gentoo is excellent documentation (particularly the howtos), a very down-to-earth and helpful user community, and the ability to install all kinds of bleeding edge or obscure packages if I really need them (which often I do). Hmm. Decisions decisions. Robert -- Robert Persson Conspiracy Bears: Once upon a time there were lots of conspiracy bears... -- [email protected] mailing list
