Re: [gentoo-dev] Maintaining production systems - and losing ebuilds

[Don Seiler <rizzo@gentoo.org>]

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On Tue, Nov 11, 2003 at 09:53:27PM +0100, Spider wrote:
> begin  quote
> Yes, this is in fact the thing that made Debian completely unusable at
> work (they apply fixes to their main tree)  , and also rules out Gentoo.

Ditto.  Devs can have gentoo on their workstations (and we do), but for
servers we have to use RedHat AS.  Although this mainly too is because
we are an Oracle shop and Oracle only supports RHAS and Suse.  But
ebrostig pointed out that Oracle will "never" support Gentoo because it
changes too much:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=25080

"Oracle has never and will never certify the databases with Gentoo. The
only 2 distributiuons currently certified with Oracle 9i is RedHat
Advanced Server 2.1 and SuSE SLES 7.1

...

The reason is very simple.

In order to ensure that you are running Oracle on a stable platform,
which all of our customers are interested in, we have decided to certify
it against distributions that will stay stable for a certain amount of
time. Gento is a very dynamic distributions, people can install both
stable and unstable packages which will, sooner or later, break Oracle.

Besides this, the cost of certifying a distribution is failry high and
there is a lot of work involved on our and on the distributions part.

It is basically a business justification and we don't want to maintain
staff that knows the intricate details of too many distributions.
Currently we also do OS support on redHat AS 2.1 in addition to normal
Oracle support."

I realize Gentoo's management may not have the delusions of grandeur to
become an Oracle-certified distro but I'm just laying down the facts.

Don.

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