[Klug-general] Shiny New Laptop

[Stuart Buckland]

On Fri, 2006-04-21 at 17:00 +0100, Karl Lattimer wrote:

> Generally they still use the same cycle of release, devel -> testing ->
> deploy, and have fairly good QC, but its not as good as RHEL. If you
> have to manage it yourself, then there can be problems but generally, at
> least now a days its not really an issue.
> 
> > 
> > Then there is the majority of situations in which every package you need
> > is provided by RH and there is no need to source anything externally.
> > While that is great for stability and management you will eventually
> > find you have become victim to vendor lock-in.
> > 
> > The whole concept of vendor lock-in with Open Source software always
> > amuses me but there you have it.
> 
> Yep! ;) You're still free to build your own packages, add them to
> distribution discs, repositories etc... 

> Anaconda is after all open source. ;)

Absolutely, but that then brings us into the position of introducing
potential instability yet again and adds a not insignificant management
cost.

Ultimately it comes down to having effective processes and cost.
So long as you have appropriate and effective processes in place for
dealing with the management of Gentoo, RH, <insert any OS name here> and
you are prepared to accept the inherent costs involved then one
distribution is as good as and as flawed as any other.

It isn't the distribution that makes one more stable than another (after
all it's all Linux) it's the management.

With RH, for example, you are effectively outsourcing the bulk of the QA
process to someone else (I'm ignoring issues of trust here).  While that
reduces the direct cost to you of QA there are cost increases in other
areas.

With Gentoo, the direct QA costs will be higher than that of using RH
but other costs will decrease too.

Depending on how your organisation is structured, the processes you have
in place and resource utilisation in various areas you may find one
distribution is a more appropriate choice than another.  Gentoo should
not be totally dismissed as a viable option, neither should Windows.

I really seem to have run off on a tangent.  I think my initial point
was simply to not dismiss Gentoo out of hand, it does have a place just
as much as any other distro/OS.

I think I'll shut up and leave the coffee alone before I run off on yet
more tangents :)

Stu


-- 
Stuart Buckland <stuart at nightime.org.uk>