On Thu, 26 Jul 2007, Gregory Stark wrote:
So for me to reproduce your [Gentoo] environment you would have to send me the complete history of what packages you installed. I would have to reproduce the entire history including installing and building intermediate versions.
If one's goal is to be able to make several copies of a server run completely identical builds of all software down to the build order level, then Gentoo obviously makes that more difficult than other distributions. It's easier if you build each replicant at the same time and then keep them synchronized, but cloning a machine that's already out there and has been through a series of updates that perfectly is as challenging as you describe. If the primary goal here was reproducable benchmarks where you needed SPEC-submission level version control, Gentoo would be a completely inappropriate choice.
But this is pushing forward PostgreSQL development you're doing here. If you've got a problem such that something works differently based on the order in which you built the packages, which is going to be unique to every Linux distribution already, that is itself noteworthy and deserves engineering out. You might think of this high-end machine being a little different as usefully adding diversity robustness in a similar way to how the buildfarm helps improve the core right now.
I think I have to exit this discussion before I start sounding like a Gentoo fanboi and make my Linux consulting clients nervous. Go RedHat!
-- * Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
