I think in Gentoo the stability of the package depends to a large extent on the maintainer of the package. Since it is a continuously evolving distribution, with no releases in the traditional sense, there is no centralized group testing and releasing packages. Once a maintainer feels that a new release is ready, out it goes.
I would disagree that Gentoo is notorious for releasing changes that break things (I've had very few problems), but I would say that you should be more cautious than with other distros when in a production environment. When a major release happens for a package, I sometimes wait for a few days before putting it in. This lets the dust settle while everyone else sorts out any problems ... with such a configurable system things are bound to be different amongst users, potentially causing problems for some. Also, if you can't afford downtime, I would suggest more than one system, where you can build, install and test on one system, and then install on the others. This way you can also build binary packages, making it easier to revert to the older version, and avoid compiling on all machines. Things I like about Gentoo are it's excellent documentation (I sometimes refer to it even when working on other distros, if applicable), the range of packages, the ability to install bleeding edge packages, and the flexibility. Sometimes Ubuntu tempts me though. :-) Another thing I like is that CPAN modules can be incorporated into your portage tree. Instead of having an ebuild for every Perl module on CPAN, there's a script that does a certain amount of integration between CPAN and portage, helping keep everything consistent. It drives me crazy having a mix of RPM's and CPAN on RedHat systems. Owen On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 09:15:47AM -0500, William Sutton wrote: <snip> > I don't think it is a production system. Gentoo is notorious for > releasing changes without doing thorough testing (google for the apache > 1.series to apache 2.series breakages), for example. > > On the whole it has a place, and installing a few Gentoo systems is a good > learning experience...I just wouldn't run one in production. </snip> -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
