Robert Persson wrote:
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
I agree 100% I did the Linux from scratch thing for a while. Then I
realized I spend *more* time maintaining linux from scratch then
actually using it.
I then did Fedora for a while. I will always like Fedora because RH was
my first distro and I am use to the RH-way of things. However I got
tired the bloat and rpm repo conflicts. I couldn't get MP3, mplayer and
other media stuff from fedora so I would have to use different repos and
run in to conflicts.
In between the above two I did Gentoo for a while.
I then did Ubuntu and loved apt. So simple. I was a happy camper until
I ran into the one big issue with binary distros I call the
out-dated-package syndrome. The mono packages including mod_mono for
apache were old and required apache1 while I wanted apache2. After
running into issues with wanting newer versions of packages under
ubuntu, I came back to Gentoo about 3 months ago. So far I don't spend
too much time maintaining. I just don't do an update too often.
I did just try the newest version of Ubuntu and have to say it is *very*
nice. Everything on my laptop worked OTB.
However, I do like being able to customize my system and Gentoo gives me
a very nice way to do that. The only current issue I with Gentoo that I
want to address is a recovery option. I will probably post a thread on
that topic soon. I have about 1GB in /usr/portage/packages so I guess I
can back that up. However, I want a faster method to restore than I
currently can do with Gentoo. If I lost my system now, it would mean
rebuilding my base system and the would leave me without a functioning
system for a while. With Ubunutu, I would be back up with a base system
in 30 mins.
Jim
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JimD
Central FL, USA, Earth, Sol
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