Jijo -
On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, Federico Sevilla III wrote:
> The last time that I'm sure gcc worked fine was when I built the kernel
> I'm running on. /boot/bzImage-2.4.6-ac1 was last changed Fri Jul 6
> 18:50:07 2001. A 'find -cnewer /boot/bzImage-2.4.6-ac1' in the
> /var/cache/apt/archives/ directory spews out a lot of files: packages I
> downloaded and installed after I made the 2.4.6-ac1 kernel. It's a pretty
For this i believe you will need to inspect the 'spec' files of the
packages (or whatever they are called in debian). Look for the ones that
create the file.
> Debian's unstable is pretty stable when compared to other distributions.
> gcc 2.96 that was shipped with RedHat 7.0, for example, was never even in
Redhat's broken compiler was released for a reason. Believe it or not,
redhat does this kind of stunt fairly often, as a service to the
community. Remember redhat 5.0 and how they forced us to migrate from
libc5 to glibc? Almost all apps broke way back then, and we had to deal
with glibc bugs in our face (including security issues!). I remember
sticking to RH 4.2 which was rock solid as compared to 5.0 and 5.1; I
only started upgrading when along came 5.2.
But if redhat didn't do that, no one would have tested glibc and made it
the mature library we have today. Same goes for the gcc compiler. Due to
the sheer number of users testing it, the compiler has matured a lot, and
distros based on it (RH 7.1/Mdk 8.0) are all pretty stable as well as
their compilers included.
> So I'm caught in a bind (not the DNS software). Stable is stable, but it's
> too stale for me. Unstable is okay most of the time, but there's no
> guarantee it won't f*ck up on you, and with Gusi I can't take chances.
So true.
> What kind of a distribution am I looking for?
>
> First I'm looking for something that doesn't have a track record as bad as
> RedHat.
> Second I'm looking for a distribution that updates packages fast.
> Third I'm looking for a distribution that has some mechanism to aid me in
> keeping my system updated.
Ok here's my take on this. The way i see it, there are several factors
that affect the choice of distro i deploy for clients [in order of
importance]
1. Security
2. Maintainability
3. Stability/Maturity/Does the job well/Active Package Team
4. Hardware Support
5. Ease of Use/Installation
For these issues, i believe the Mandrake distro provides more than
adequately. Explaining myself:
1. Security to me is the top of the top, mainly because a lot of clients
require that for peace of mind. Distros that require a lot of painful
upgrading and tweaking to make it secure are therefore out. A _major_
factor is the speed in which the distro maker announces package updates
for security patches. As most distro makers have an "internal" mailing
list aside from BUGTRAQ, a published vulnerability will usually generate
spontanous announcements from major distros within 24 hours. This is
good. In general Redhat, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian are very responsive in
this. Some time back, Mandrake spearheaded an audit of the OSS packages
they include in their distro, the results of which produced a frenzy of
security announcements from almost all major distro vendors. Other less
known, less actively developed distros may cause trouble when security
problems are discovered.
2. Maintainability. As i have said so often before, a linux system
without package management software is a disaster waiting to happen. One
cannot intelligently say that it is possible to maintain several linux
boxes without them having a system for keeping track of the files in its
filesystem, application package versions, each file's MD5 sigs and others.
Therefore i say for the record, that distros like slackware are definitely
out of the question. Slackware is good for beginning beginners wanting to
know what happens 'under the hood', but by all means they should graduate
to more mature distros once they get the picture.
3. Stability/Maturity/Does the job well/Active Package team. This is
actually the meat of the distro. If it's file service you need, think
clearly what features you like to provide. If it's plain and simple file
service, the latest samba 2.0.10 does it very well. But if it's PDC
emulation, you need samba 2.2; The right tool for the job. Mandrake
Cooker provides very much updated SRPMs for this kind of need.
4. Hardware Support. The newer the distro, the better the hardware
support. This is basically evident in two areas: kernel, and xfree86.
At times, my answer to this 'pressing need to upgrade my distro' when i am
faced with issues like this is to simply move over the new kernel or XFree
to the older box, if its at all possible [try recompiling XFree86 4.10 on
a redhat 5.2 system!]. If you're successful, you get the best of both
worlds - a stable base, with better hardware support.
5. Ease of use/installation. Clients using the X Desktop have to be
'convinced' that it's easy to use. That's my beef with the bare KDE and
GNOME desktops of RedHat. Absolutly no effort was made to improve the
functionality of the desktop. Probably because it wasn't their priority
anyway. I find out that it's not particularly productive to say "don't
touch the server, it will kill you' to clients who actually paid you to
setup their linux system. This type of 'fear' inculcation will only make
your point-people in the client site very nervous when you ask them to
type in commands over the phone. The friendliness and familiarity of the
KDE desktop makes it a lot easier for people coming from windows to adopt
it.
> dpkg prompts users before updating configuration files and I've found this
Mandrake has a utility called MandrakeUpdate which will connect to an FTP
server/mirror, display a list of programs in need of updating. You select
or deselect the packages you want to dload/update and it's done. There's
no text mode version, so me being the tech at heart, i don't use it. I
made my own perl script \8)
> very useful. I despise having to search for the rpmsaves or whatever
> they're called now.
It's still called rpmsave and rpmnew depending on the behaviour or the
spec file. In general if the package was done well, you won't have any
troubles.
So what's my bottom line? Simply that you don't need to keep on updating
to the latest versions. Doing that is an exercise for hackers over at
redhat/mandrake/suse/debian. And they do that for a reason - to get the
latest bleeding edge, sort out the kinks, report bugs to the authors and
fine tune their distro for users like you and me to deploy with peace of
mind.
Your job is to provide the most stable linux/open source solution to your
clients. And for all we know debian stable is capable of doing that.
And if parts of the stable tree fail to meet up to requirements, then by
all means update only the part that lacks functionality. As i said
there's nothing wrong with updating only samba to 2.2.1 if you need a
stable PDC implementation?
Only exceptions to this are if a particular package upgrade would require
upgrades also for other dependent packages. Like: kernel 2.4 requires
updating modutils, ext2utils, and glibc, and util-linux. But then ask
yourself again.. why do i need to upgrade in the first place? Unless you
have need of the better SMP implementation, using memory > 2GB, or have
need for the newer device drivers of 2.4, there's no need to upgrade at
all.
My advise is, if you're at home with debian, stick with debian. You can
play around with a test system and see if it works with certain new
packages, but unless you're pretty confident of what you've done, don't
even think of deploying it.
The only exceptions are security and major bug fixes, in which case you
absolutely need to upgrade [ex. bind,lpd,sendmail]. But even then, in the
case of bug fixes you may find that even though there may be 1000
different bug fixes between the ancient and current versions, your
deployed ancient version is still happy and chugging along, primarily
because your requirements don't even touch the part of the program that
has bugs.
I still run highly security-patched redhat 4.2 servers in some of my
clients simply because they do the job they are tasked to do [using much
less hardware muscle] -> in this case being a network time server, or
service monitor. If it ain't broken, there's no need apply any fix.
That's my PhP 1.05
HTH
Ian
_
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