[Gllug] Red hat 8 subscription

[Jim Bailey]

On Wed, Jun 04, 2003 at 12:43:36PM +0100, itsbruce at uklinux.net wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 04, 2003 at 11:11:36AM +0100, Jim Bailey wrote:
> > > 
> > > Gentoo is fine for a home desktop, but it's not practical when you have 
> > > more than about 3 servers to maintain.  I have 170.
> > 
> > FUD prove it and I will make a public apology.
> 
> It's not FUD, Jim.  Gentoo is very flexible for a workstation set-up but
> I don't trust it the way I trust Debian, whose stable and testing
> versions are kept reliable by the mutual hatred and suspicion of
> hundreds of volunteer developers and package maintainers all yelling
> that change X would break their package so don't you even think about
> it.  I don't trust it the way I would trust Red Hat, which has a rather
> larger development team than Gentoo and a huge presence in computer
> systems worldwide, the latter factor forcing them to show some
> responsibility in managing their versions and upgrades.

Absolutely Gentoo rocks for work stations in fact their stock kernel is
optomizied for it. doing an emerge kde from a minimal install and
watching it just run blew me away. :)

I agree totally with you with regards to Debian, Red Hat and SuSE being
the safe choice for a production environment.  They are the distros
everyone knows, they are the distros you can sell to the suits.  Would I
run Gentoo in a production environment?  Absolutely _not_ I don't know it
well enough yet and if it does fsck up I would be responsible for it and
everyone knows how much I hate responsibility. ;)  

Ask me in a year or so though and I may give you a different answer.

That though is not the same as it not been practical to run Gentoo in
large server clusters which was what I originally challenged Martin
over.  I can see places where Gentoo could make a place for its self
computational clusters seem a natural habitat for it, render farms
another.
> 
> Gentoo's own site makes fun of the conservatism of other distributions,
> which just underlines the fact that it is, so far, developed by and for
> hobbyists.  I regularly have to roll out changes across over a dozen
> different locations across England and Wales and I won't even consider
> Gentoo until they stop sneering, stop harping about the stupid "cutting
> edge" and grow up.  Which I expect they will, eventually.

Gentoo isn't just about the latest unstable version of package X but
that does attract a certain bunch of leet yahoos who are giving Gentoo a
bad rep.  Behind them are a bunch of very talented developers giving us
packages like rc-update which makes init.d a dream to admin and
xeasyconfig which makes configuring X under PPC much less painful.
finally for those who doubt Gentoo isn't serious about enterprise should
check out the live CD EVMS out of the box and IBM AFAIK are funding some
of the development work.  

It is a young distro but one that is growing up fast.

Fsck it my words were a bit harsh so I will say sorry and mean it.

Sorry Martin :)

Peace Jim


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