Re: [gentoo-user] Time to move on?

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Sunday 22 March 2009 07:50:04 Mike Diehl wrote:
> So here is the question:  Are these just growing pains, or is this the
> trend with Gentoo?  If I resolve to update frequently, will these problems
> become more rare?

I've been using Gentoo for 4 years now, my main desktop is still running code 
that I compiled on the first install in 2005. And I'm on my third Gentoo 
notebook in a row. Absurb update issues simply don't happen, as long as you 
follow the rules:

Update weekly on <~arch>
Update monthly on <arch>
Adjust to suit your needs.

You ran into the mktemp issue, which feels about a year old from this corner, 
so Iguess you have not been updating regularly. I'm not sure where you got the 
advice to update only when you need a new feature or a fix, but it is not 
workable in practice.

Gentoo does have issues, but the majority of them are with changes to 
packages, not changes to Gentoo. Remember that with Gentoo you are rebuilding 
a live system on the actual system itself. We don't have build farms that 
rebuild the entire distro and push out new rpms nightly - so the problems that 
can hit Gentoo don't happen to binary distro users.

Take expat. It got an upgrade a long time ago which coudl break Gnome entirely 
if you didn't do it right. There was nothing the devs could do really, because 
that's how those packages were written. The normal case is to have a bare 
machine, build expat, then build Gnome. On Gentoo, you want to do all of this 
while using the Gnome that needs to be rebuilt. If you update regularly, 
you'll find lots of people around who know what the steps are and can help. 
Today, most of us have forgotten and need to turn to Google to find the 
howtos.

If you find this happens more and more often with gentoo, it is probably a  
symptom of more and more useful packages out there, that are being developed 
faster with more features. See it as a sign of success on the part of FLOSS 
rather than a failing of Gentoo.

And I would advise AGAINST gentoo on your out-of-state servers. They need too 
much pampering to keep them stable. I have about 100 machines at work, a 
mixture of 30% FreeBSD, SuSE <ugh>, some Centos and even a single lone Solaris 
machine. The worst of the lot has to be the SVN server, running Gentoo. No-one 
will touch it anymore, and the last time I did, I broke it horribly with a 
conflict between portage and cpan Perl modules.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com