[Gllug] Red hat 8 subscription

[Tethys]

Pete Black writes:

>Surely having an interpreter on a production machine is also a security risk
>then? Bye bye um, everything?

Yes. Everything is a security risk. So you minimize what's installed
on the box, so that any intruder has as hard a time as possible in the
event that the system's compromised. A shell is required for the correct
operation of the system. A compiler isn't, so it doesn't get installed.

>I utterly fail to see how gentoo is a problem here, and I also fail to see
>the need for a separate mirror of each production machine. A distro like
>Debian or Redhat supports most machines without a 'mirror' of each specific
>setup. Same with Gentoo. 

No, but with RH or Debian, you can just install the appropriate package
on the machine in question. Maybe I'm wrong (and I freely admit my
experience of Gentoo is limited to some brief playing around), but I
understood you couldn't do the same with Gentoo. Or does it have a
binary package system as well as the build from source option?

>Its not like you can't run a binary compiled on one gentoo system on
>another machine, and there is no specific need to have a compiler
>on the servers that have their packages compiled by your 'master'
>machine that just happens to run gentoo, or for the 'master' machine
>to be exposed to the rest of the world.

So how do you plan to get it from the master server to the others?

>Does it really pain Debian bigots so much that Gentoo has grown into an
>excellent distribution with a really good package manager?

I'm not a Debian bigot :-) Furthermore, I like Daniel Robbins. A
lot. He's a sound guy, and he definitely knows his stuff. But I'm
unconvinced about the viability of Gentoo for mainstream use, and
I just can't see any advantages to compiling from source.

Tet


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