I think michael gives a good summary. if you go with gentoo i would implement a few rules.
1. don't blindly install all updates, do a --pretend run of emerge first and see what it will do, don't just glance at the results, read them and make sure you are happy. 2. keep an eye on the gentoo mailing lists and forums (mailing lists available from the gmane news server too, its high volume). Sometimes packages break in unpredictable ways. i have seen versions go in and out of portage stable in one day when a critical f***up is made. 3. having said that most problems seem to be with X and its friends, kde, fonts, gnome openoffice etc. you will have up to date binaries, but deb testing may be a bit more _stable_ On Fri, 21 Nov 2003 10:10:17 +1300 Michael JasonSmith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, 2003-11-21 at 09:47, Peter Murray wrote: > > Without starting a flame war on distros, could I please have some > > feedback on maintenance and stability issues from people actually > > running servers with gentoo or debian. > I run Sid (Debian Unstable) at Uni and RedHat 9 at home. I find that > Sid makes an excellent development workstation but I do not think most > users would appreciate applications changing as much as they do under > Unstable. However, having access to the latest tools with minimal > effort is a big bonus to Unstable. (I run RH9 at home because I do not > have a network connection there so Debian tends to be less than useful.) > > The downside of Unstable is that it can be unstable. I recall a > memorable day in '99 when PAM (the subsystem that checks your passwords) > died a death and stopped *everyone* logging in (including root). Such a > critical error does not happen frequently, but once every couple of > months an application will stop working. If the application is mission > critical I will fix the problem and submit a bug, if it is not then I > will wait a couple of days and install the new version. It is the price > you pay for being 1337. > > Stable is renowned for being very stable. The only updates are to fix > security issues; no new features are *ever* added to Stable after it has > been released. This is a bit of a headache for Debian as they often > have to fix the programs themselves because the upstream developers only > fix the security bugs in the new versions of the software, which also > implements new features. > > Between the extremes of Unstable and Stable is Testing. Packages are > added to Testing automatically when they have sat in Unstable for a > period of time without being updated. This would be a good option for a > general purpose machine because you generally have new applications but > you are not on the bleeding edge all the time. > > The Debian installer is less than amazing. This is not such a big issue > as you only run the installer once; when a new version of Stable comes > out the package manager just quietly moves you to the new version. > > The final advantage of Debian is that it runs on eleven (11!) different > architectures. This means that errors are often found in Debain more > quickly than the other distributions as each architecture is quite good > at finding different types of bugs. For example, Sparc machines are > very good at detecting errors in memory management code. > -- > Michael JasonSmith http://www.ldots.org/ > -- Nick Rout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
