[Lancaster] Re: the kitchen network.

[Richard Robinson]

On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 03:28:42PM +0100, Martyn Welch wrote:
> 
> Debian is a community based distribution, a very stable one. New versions are 
> released as and when very high quality checks are passed, however this 
> happens in a rather loose time frame and leads to a very stable but low 
> feature distribution.
> 
> ...
> 
> This server needs to be built and used with minimal change in features and 
> minimal maintenance. If woody has the features it's probably by far the most 
> stable distribution out there.
> 
> To be honest I know only a little indeed about maintaining Debian, I don't use 
> it as much as Mandrake, however it is generally regarded as being extremely 
> solid. As someone else has pointed out, for a web server security is _the_ 
> most important attribute.

I've been using Debian (the current "stable") on my box ever since the
aout->ELF libc5->libc6 changes. They're very stable. When first released
they'll only be several months behind the rest of the world, and then
it'll be a few years before the next release ... which is probably, as
Martyn says, not a problem for a server. Installation is said to be
offputting, but wth; do it once and forget. Once set up, doesn't seem to
need a lot of maintenance - security updates, etc, can be done more ore
less transparently ("apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" :- could almost
do from a cron job, except once in a while it asks a question about
overwiting conffiles, or something).

It does get very behind the times, but I like it, it works well. I've
been meaning to look at Gentoo for ages, but haven't got round to it
yet.

There is also the question of how many different distros maintainers
would want to have to learn their way round, if something glitzier was
wanted for the frontend machines ?



-- 
Richard Robinson
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem