Adventures are pretty personal [LWN.net]

Adventures are pretty personal

Posted Sep 19, 2006 21:57 UTC (Tue) by felixfix (subscriber, #242)
Parent article: My Gentoo odyssey (Linux.com)

In my case, I chose gentoo two years ago because I wanted a 64 bit system and Slackware is 32 bit only. Yes, I know there is an offshoot 64 bit slackware, but I have seen some bad reports and it is not from Patrick, so I didn't go that way.

I have come to the conclusion that gentoo has too many amateurs with too much say with too little historical knowledge. /bin/ls once got recompiled with a link against a /usr/lib library; people, you just can't do that! Root partition commands need to link against root partition libraries only. Another time, a library used by lvm was removed during an upgrade without relinking lvm; luckily I could use a rescue disk to change a symlink and it stayed up long enough to relink for real. The latest fiasco is that a kde package created a /usr/lib library which it shoudln't have, overriding a /lib library and disabling many many packages, include ssh, so I could no longer log in remotely to see what was wrong.

Similar amateurish nonsense has happened too often. But I stick with gentoo because (a) I really don't like the other 64 bit choices with their gui configuraters and shadow config files and vastly patched kernels, and (b) because I do like updating by emerge rather than doing a complete install from scratch for every major upgrade. But I won't recommend it, and if my Opteron system were to die, I would seriously think about replacing it with a 32 bit system and going back to Slackware, even tho I would not enjoy the twice yearly reinstall upgrades.

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Adventures are pretty personal

Posted Sep 19, 2006 23:34 UTC (Tue) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]

Sorry for the impudent selfpromotion: Debian amd64 (already in 3.1 "sarge", officially in the upcoming 4.0 "etch") does not feature GUI configurators, shadow config files, or a vastly patched kernel. You definitely do never a complete install from scratch for a major update. The specific problems you mentioned about Gentoo are not likely to occur in Debian, as there is a stringent policy. The compliance of packages with the policy is checked both manually by developers and users and automatically by the lintian and linda tools. Of course, Debian is far from being errorless! (Btw. I used to use SLS and Slackware before Debian.)

Adventures are pretty personal

Posted Sep 20, 2006 2:24 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Redhat to Slackware to Gentoo to Debian for me. More or less.

I liked slackware probably the most, but in terms of having to compile my own software it was too tedious. The first time wasn't bad, but over having the system for several months and wanting to update this or that it became pretty hard.

I tried Gentoo fairly early on since it seemed like Slackware except with package management. It was fine, having to compile everything is tiresome though. I liked the install though because I learned how to setup a chroot environment from it.

After that I did a bunch of quad booting and tried FreeBSD and such and left my Gentoo install to langish for a 3 or 4 months or so. After that I tried to update it and it basicly self-destructed. So much of the system had changed that trying to get it back up to date was a lost cause.

With Debian it was difficult to come to term with living with the package management system. It seems that the whole distro revolves around just the package management system and it's easy to break stuff if you go around in the ham-fisted Slackware style of administrating stuff.

But otherwise it's the only system that is realy maintainable for me in the long term. I had a install going for several years and it outlasted 2 computers.

Now I think I would have a very hard time going back to Gentoo. Debian has revealed to me that I very much prefer spending my time using my computer rather then working to maintain my system when stuff randomly break on each update.

Let me ask about Debian

Posted Sep 20, 2006 3:10 UTC (Wed) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

I tried Debian many years ago and was horrified at the install. My memory is having to individually select thousands of packages.

Plus it seems to be way out of date, frommemories and judging from the jokes about how ancient Debian is, preferring stability at such a premium that it seems to take forever to get any current packages. Of course there are the unstable branches ..

So, can you Debian folks comment on those aspects? How much of a pain is it to use the unstable branch, and how much of a pain to install from scratch?

On another topic, two things I like about gentoo are being able to configure packages that I want, such as choosing KDE and no Gnome, etc, the USE flags. I am not talking about fussing with complier flags here, but package flags, so you get just the combination of features you want. If I want emacs without a GUI, it's easy enough, and so on.

The second feature I like is not having to ever reinstall from scratch when new releases came out. Even if the compiler changes, or the glibc major version, I may have to recompile everything, but I don't have to reinstall from scratch and merge my config changes back into the new install. How does Debian handle this?

Lastly, how does the Debian 64 bit release compare to the 32 bit release? I know a few packages are 32 bit only, like OpenOffice and firefox, but is everything done in parallel for the most part?

Let me ask about Debian

Posted Sep 20, 2006 6:14 UTC (Wed) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link]

Last point first: AMD64 wasn't (quite) released as Debian 3.1 but released
about a fortnight later: it therefore isn't in the main archives as Debian
3.1. 64 bit only, though with the option of 32 bit compatibility libraries.
Will be released as a full architecture with Debian 4.0 [Currently Debian
Etch/testing]. Rocks :) Has almost as many packages as the 32 bit Debian.
Missing: OpenOffice.org, 32 bit only video codecs and "stuff", some Firefox
plugins? Ncurses install, though now with the option of a GTK gui. Running
it here on 2 machines (one testing, one unstable). The name is a slight
misnomer - it will run happily on Intel EM64T with no modification.
Installing <random package from source> from scratch - eminently possible,
but probably unnecessary for the most part. [Someone asked me once about
scapy - a packet mungeing tool - and I watched the chaos of a Gentoo
install which needed large amounts compiled, libraries updated - took about
half a morning to get a half working package. On a Debian testing box, I
just did "apt-get install scapy" - and it worked.]

Let me ask about Debian

Posted Sep 20, 2006 8:40 UTC (Wed) by tyhik (subscriber, #14747) [Link]

I have used debian for many years and about last 4 years, I have used only unstable on my development boxes and at home. The unstable branch has been really stable for me. During these 4 years, there have been about 6-7 incidents, when I have noticed something broken. I have hit the package dependency problems a few times, a few times got crashing firefox and once got emacs which did not color file content correctly. Dependency problems needed tweaking, but in general the next day the problems were fixed. I usually upgrade once a month and avoid upgrading in the middle of busy times.

Now, I probably run just a narrow set of software on my boxes, needed for c/c++ development. Also, I have always compiled my kernels myself, so I cannot comment on debian kernels.

Let me ask about Debian

Posted Sep 20, 2006 9:53 UTC (Wed) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]

Hello felixfix,

as a Debian developer, I have to agree: A few years back, the installation process was really difficult to handle and the package selection mechanism was sometimes painful. Since version 3.1 (codename "sarge") there is a completely new installer ("d-i" = Debian installer), that does automatic hardware detection and features "tasksel", a task selection mechanism, where you just select zero or more package groups like "Web server", "Desktop system" etc.

Second thing: Out of date software. Again, I have to agree, that this was a problem with Debian. We got better, I believe: We try to do official ("stable") releases more frequently than before (next release 4.0 "etch" planned 2006-12-04, IIRC) and if stable is too old for you, you have two options: Either use the "testing" distribution (or even "unstable", if you are courageous), or use only selected new software from backports.org.

In your case, I strongly recommend to download the Debian installer CD from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/News/2006/20... and just give it a try.

Debian does not support an equivalent to Gentoo USE flags, sorry. If you like KDE, just install it and remove GNOME. I installed XFCE and removed both GNOME and KDE.

About reinstallation on major upgrades: IMHO, this never has been an issue with Debian. You always could do smooth upgrades, even on major library or compiler or kernel changes.

Debian amd64 is a pure 64 bit port. Currently, only 64 bit programs are supported, i.e. neither openoffice nor wine. Firefox runs fine on amd64. You can install openoffice, wine or proprietary software in a chroot environment and still run it from outside via symlinks.

Let me ask about Debian

Posted Sep 20, 2006 22:43 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Debian stable only realy suffered from big lags in software.

This was fine for server, but sucked for Desktop.

You use Debian Unstable if you want stuff up to date. Debian Testing is a bit less churn then unstable and usually you'll not get the odd package that breaks things in Unstable.

You use Debian Stable for production systems. Stuff you want to set and forget or 'just work'.

With Debian Etch hopefully getting released on time this will be a huge breakthrough for Debian. It will not only benifit Debian, but the whole host of popular distros that base themselves off of Debian. (Ubuntu, Mepis, Linspire, Xandros, etc etc).

As a whole this will lift up Linux-based systems. Debian and the work they do is simply incredable when it comes to unifing and stabilising software for Linux systems.

Nowadays when using Debian Unstable your software is more up to date then what you can find in Ubuntu or Fedora unless either distro did a new release that month. It updates continiously vs 6 month release cycle.

If you want to compile optimized packages it's not that difficult. It's not super automated like with Gentoo, but the package management system does support downloading source packages and recompiling them. You'll quickly find that it's pretty pointless except for very specific programs and libraries.

If you haven't tried Debian for a long time then I suggest installing Debian Testing. It's very nice.

For deploying stuff like large numbers of desktops Debian Stable would be my first choice. When you get down into it Debian IS the most complete system that I know of. Seriously. It's got a lot of corner cases cornered. If you want to use a newer Desktop then Debian Stable offers, but you don't want to upgrade your system or half your system to Debian Testing there is backports that recompile testing packages for Debian Stable.

With pinning and recompiling packages it's possible to backport the odd package from Debian testing or unstable to Stable without having to upgrade a bunch of libraries and other stuff. I recompiled OpenAFS from testing to run on stable since the openafs project made big improvements since Debian Stable was released.

For server usage it's pretty good. Setup a Gentoo box and a CentOS box and a Debian Stable (or Debian Testing if you want newer stuff) box next to one another and setup a rather complex website using Drupal or something like that. Something that uses most of the 'LAMP' stack or whatnot. (for debian stable you'd just go "apt-get install drupal" ) Let them run for a for a few months keeping up with the latest security updates and such and you'll probably find that out of the boxes the Debian Stable system would be the box that required the least amount of effort in maintaining.

One of the troublesome things with Debian is how they change packages around to fit. Sometimes changing configuration files locations or moving stuff to /var which would be in /usr by default and stuff like that.

To combat this you'll find every package and command has a 'man' file. It's a bug if it's not there. Also debian changelogs, documentation provided by the upstream source tarball, and other things such as sometimes configuration samples end up in /usr/share/doc/<packagename>. I've found this very usefull. Especially for things were upstream doc is a bit vage on configuration files such as mplayer.

Google for 'Debian Desktop Survival Guide'. I've found that very usefull.

The stuff for Debian Testing is at:
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

I suggest the Netinst image. If you have lots of machines or want to try different installs setup apt-proxy on a machine and you'll cache the packages so that you can do reinstalls or multiple unique installs faster. Skim through the installation guide also. There is a lot of good information there.

Personally I like to try out new stuff time to time. Gentoo is still interesting and especially Fedora Core is nice to look at. They have some fancy stuff with things like Stateless linux and those clustering features are very interesting. For some reason though Debian testing seems much faster then Fedora Core even though they are using about the same stuff... but maybe it's just me. It's tough sometimes.

Adventures are pretty personal

Posted Sep 20, 2006 0:48 UTC (Wed) by dberkholz (subscriber, #23346) [Link]

The /lib stuff you suggest isn't because people are unaware of the reasoning or the policy, it's because they don't mount /usr later, they don't notice and there's no QA tool to notice this specific issue for them.

Adventures are pretty personal

Posted Sep 20, 2006 11:14 UTC (Wed) by Klavs (subscriber, #10563) [Link]

I just had to note, that you can simply setup sandbox (or in my case, I use usersandbox), and overwrite protection in make.conf - then a new package CAN'T overwrite existing files.
in regards to the wrong linking of /bin/ls to a /usr/lib.. someone clearly messed up on that one.

And it's not from Patrick too? ;-)

Posted Sep 20, 2006 17:48 UTC (Wed) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

> and it is not from Patrick
Slackwarists being *that* consumerish, they will kill off Patrick and panic if (or... when) he's ill again. Any clue on collaboration, no? Fork da rule? :(

> /bin/ls once got recompiled with a link against a /usr/lib library
Well in ALT Linux, many things like this are auto-checked (including duplicated ELF symbols to catch e.g. static zlib linkage -- you should guess why).

> (a) I really don't like the other 64 bit choices
I guess you might even not really need them; see recent LWN article on that.

> (b) because I do like updating by emerge rather than doing a complete install
You should have looked at e.g. Debian then; I guess it's hard for a slackwarist exactly because of all the words one might have heard from "them", but then, most of them might be just true.

I'm also not used to reinstalls, we have apt in ALT.

> and going back to Slackware
Years of experience don't neccessarily make an amateur a professional, if he comes to understand that / utilities must not depend on /usr but still fails to "get" strategic shifts in distro building, namely that there is more to other distros than Slackware simply because there are more *powerful* and seasoned people working on them, and even amateurs (like me, on Linux since 1998, working on ALT since 2001) doing some useful job under their guidance.

Sorry to write this, but I've been discussing this kind of things with two old-time slackwarist friends of mine (whom I respect) and a bunch of youngster phanatic types (whom I disrespect for total lack of logic, just crying "it's coool" isn't gonna make it that or otherwise help do anything)... you fit the "elder" pattern quite good.

And it's not from Patrick too? ;-)

Posted Sep 20, 2006 18:10 UTC (Wed) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

Being from Patrick means it won't include nonsense like linking root partition commands against non-root libraries, that it will be very vanilla, and that it will simply work without fuss. He's got a rock solid reputation and gentoo never will as long as the amateurs can so easily screw it up, whether due to ego clashes or lack of QA doesn't matter.

As for Debian, I may give it another try. My last try was probably ten years ago, and was not encouraging.