Am 05.07.2012 23:22, schrieb Grant Edwards: > On 2012-07-05, Frank Peters wrote: >> Linux was used to find the Higgs: >> >> http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/w2ly6/new_boson_found_by_linux/ >> >> I am not really surprised, but what does disturb me is that the >> distros used in the effort were mainly "Scientific Linux and Ubuntu." >> >> Where was Gentoo? >> >> Somebody had better counsel these scientists to be better able to >> discern the quality of a Linux distro. > > I know you're probably being ironic, but... > > Scientific Linux is a distro put together by Fermilab, CERN, et alia > for doing the exact type of stuff that they do at CERN. Maybe an > argument could be made for moving SL from a RHEL base to a Gentoo > base, but trying to get them to abandon SL probably isn't going to be > easy. > > The target market for Ubuntu just doesn't seem to be very compatible > with the Gentoo, so that's going to be a tough sell also. > Yeah, just think about the timeframe for which they support their current distribution: You can keep your SL-6 distributions running until 2020 and still get security fixes! Try to do this with Gentoo while keeping binary compatibility! And I guess binary compatibility is rather important when you consider global Grid systems. When every lab and every scientist might have their own set of tools linked against libraries in your distro (often lacking a proper build system), you definitely don't want to tell them to "revdep-rebuild" their cluster... SL and Gentoo are both pretty awesome distros but they don't really have much in common. Regards, Florian Philipp