[Sussex] Newbie to the list

Matt Taylor mattt at polymor.ph
Sat Aug 2 16:42:00 UTC 2003


Hi Steve

On Saturday 02 August 2003 15:01, Steve Dobson wrote:
> Hi Matt
>
> On Sat, Aug 02, 2003 at 12:31:57PM +0100, Matt Taylor wrote:
> > > > We now use Gentoo for almost everything at work, from the lowly print
> > > > server up to web and database/transaction servers for the ecommerce
> > > > sites we build and host.
> > >
> > > Whatever rocks your boat.  I would never have though of Gentoo in a
> > > production environment, but if it works for you then go for it.
> >
> > I've had several people say that to me. I'm not sure why it matters.
>
> For me it is a question of testing.  Gentoo prides itself on being close
> to the cutting edge.  The closer you are the more chance of there is of a
> bug raising its head.
>

I would certainly agree that Debian's testing policy stands out above the 
crowd. I agree that newer software obviously has a greater risk of bugs. The 
packages that we do install are well tested upstream as you mention. My 
policy has always been 'the most reliable systems are the simplest systems'. 
That's why when I do a  ps ax  on the machines at work, all thats running is 
  PID TTY      STAT   TIME COMMAND
    1 ?        S      1:36 init [3]   --init
    2 ?        SW     0:00 [keventd]
    3 ?        SWN    0:35 [ksoftirqd_CPU0]
    4 ?        SWN    0:00 [ksoftirqd_CPU1]
    5 ?        SW     2:53 [kswapd]
    6 ?        SW     0:00 [bdflush]
    7 ?        SW     1:00 [kupdated]
    8 ?        SW     0:00 [aacraid]
    9 ?        SW     0:00 [scsi_eh_0]
   10 ?        SW     0:03 [kjournald]
   80 ?        S      0:00 /sbin/devfsd /dev
  109 ?        SW     0:06 [kjournald]
  110 ?        SW    11:03 [kjournald]
  111 ?        SW     0:01 [kjournald]
  112 ?        SW     0:06 [kjournald]
  113 ?        SW     0:01 [kjournald]
  815 ?        S      0:32 /usr/sbin/syslog-ng
 1900 ?        S      0:10 /usr/sbin/cron
 1908 vc/1     S      0:00 /sbin/agetty 38400 tty1 linux
 1909 vc/2     S      0:00 /sbin/agetty 38400 tty2 linux
 1910 vc/3     S      0:00 /sbin/agetty 38400 tty3 linux
 1911 vc/4     S      0:00 /sbin/agetty 38400 tty4 linux
 1912 vc/5     S      0:00 /sbin/agetty 38400 tty5 linux
 1913 vc/6     S      0:00 /sbin/agetty 38400 tty6 linux
21820 ?        S      0:24 /usr/sbin/sshd
  964 ?        SL     0:55 /usr/bin/ntpd -p /var/run/ntpd.pid

ignoring mission specific apps. When the system has so few components I think 
that distro specific differences are almost non existant. Can you guess from 
the output above what distro that machine is running? 

Obviously I'm only talking about servers. Desktop machines are a completely 
different arena. We have a few OSX G4 machines at work and frankly I think 
that any linux based desktop solution has got a lot of competition there. Now 
there is a system that 'just works'. I've yet to see any default 30 minute 
install of a linux distro be as functional as OSX. 

I tried the latest mandrake on a workmates laptop the other week. Pretty 
impressive and slick. Although as soon as I wanted to install a Java vm 
things got more difficult. Anyway, I think linux is getting there and will 
get there soon. Interesting that OSX doesn't have a native packaging solution 
in the same vein as ports/portage/dpkg (or is that DarwinPorts?)

I can understand the time taken by doing a emerge -up world (quite possibly a 
whole weekend on a old machine, glibc does take a while :) would be enough to 
put a lot of people off. You could be forgiven for asking the point of such a 
thing. However, I think that as machines get faster it'll become a non-issue. 
I would love to see the day when people don't bother distributing binaries 
and there is a source packaging/building system as well known/used as the gnu 
tools (like automake/autoconf). Efforts such as Metapkg (http://metapkg.org/) 
just go to emphasise the point that the kernel/os and the arch aren't 
relevant to the packaging system overall.


-- 
matt taylor
email  : mattt at polymor.ph
website: http://www.othermedia.com
mobile : +44 (0)7939 211 767
pubkey : http://www.othermedia.com/pgp
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