The Grumpy Editor's guide to (some) development distributions [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's guide to (some) development distributions

Posted Nov 8, 2007 4:42 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to (some) development distributions

I was a long time Slackware addict until I decided to upgrade my Athlon system by adding two
disk drives which overloaded the power suppy; it never did completely recover, and I upgraded
to a brand new Opteron system.  There being no 64 bit slackware (that is, officially), I went
with gentoo.  I am never sure if I am happy with it or not.  Several upgrades have left me
with a need for a rescue disk, such as deleting a lib used by LVM and making ls (/bin/ls!)
dependent on a /usr/lib library.  USB audio seemed to come and go with various upgrades, tho I
think it has been fairly stable the last few months.

What particularly interested me in my Grumpy Editor's writeup is how the only dependency
problems I have had have been some ebuild screwup which has resolved itself within a few days,
that I have never had a problem getting recent versions of any package, and that it has never
overwritten a config file.  I run the testing version, and have had more than a few runins
with arrogant developers on both the forums and mailing lists.  But the system has been
remarkably trouble free compared to the problems faced by my Grumpy Editor.  I keep on
swearing almost daily that I am fed up with the arrogant developers and some of the constantly
changing config options, but this review makes me think maybe things could be worse elsewhere.
It's been three years, I think, or is it two?

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The Grumpy Editor's guide to (some) development distributions

Posted Nov 8, 2007 8:08 UTC (Thu) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link]

I was running gentoo on my opteron box for a few years, doing updates a couple of times a
week. one thing I really did like about it is that when it ran into an altered config file it
gave you a tool to pick one or the other, or do a diff between them, etc. in many other ways
the etc-update tool needs improvement, but it was very nice in comparison to the issues
described above.

I had two times over a couple of years when the updates gave me problems, however when I had a
power hit take out a hard drive I was unable to get a current installer to boot on the system
well enough to get going (this was a week after moving so the availablility of distro boot
CD's was limited). I ended up throwing ubuntu server on there, and so far (through a dozen or
so minor updates and one release update) I've had no problems.

I tend to stick with the releases, although I have several packages that I download and
compile myself instead of useing what the distros provide.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to (some) development distributions

Posted Nov 8, 2007 8:49 UTC (Thu) by dambacher (subscriber, #1710) [Link]

Speaking of Gentoo:
Gentoo is suitable for stabel systems as well as being on the edge of development. I use it on
critical servers as well as on developing systems.

Gentoo has "emerged": using the live  and install cd you can easily get up to a running system
without compiling. This is your starting point.

the package management is done by a tool called portage and this tool has some advantages: you
can decide implicitely or explicitly for wich packages you want "stable" or "development"
conditions by using package masks. You can even select the versions to use / not to use in
fine granularity. if you want to update a package, you can take a snapshot of the old version
and then upgrade, leaving you a backdoor if something goes wrong.

gentoo provides a tool to do check your installation for security related updates and perform
this automatically.

Another advantage if you are a frequently-upgrading person is that gentoo leaves your config
files untouched and provides tools to do the merge process. this saves some anoyances after
upgrading.

if the update works, you can build a package and update other similary configured computers
from this.

Gentoo has drawbacks, too:
Config options are poorly documented, you need to search the forum for information. There are
no fully functional shiny gui tools for doing updates.
Compiling from source needs some patience. To get the X desktop as functional as in ubuntu you
need to manually select apropriate software and configure it to work correctly - without
documentation.

But if you want to be on the edge, this may not be a showstopper for you.