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
