On Oct 25, 2005, at 12:10 PM, Angela Kahealani wrote:
On Tue, 2005-10-25 11:40, Brian Chee wrote:
I REALLY love apt-get/apt-cache
/brian chee
I've used yup, yum and apt-get with Redhat / Fedora Core / Yellow Dog,
apt-get with Debian, and finally emerge with Gentoo...
they're all great tools... but they can only work as well as the
repositories they feed from, and the Fedora Core EXTRAS split into two
incompatible repositories finally drove me away from binary distros...
I'm now a Gentoo fan.
emerge --sync
emerge --update --deep system
emerge --update --deep world
means I'll NEVER again have to install from scratch every 6 mos.
I've got debian, freebsd and gentoo machines in colo.
The debian box (currently running 'sarge') has been in colo (in
various forms) for several years, (its actually not the original
hardware (though the original hardware *is* the gentoo baox)
and yes, it stays up-to-date with cron-apt. I've never had to
rebuild it, due to mistakes at the binary repository, though 'dpkg'
has occasionally been necessary in order to unwedge things, and I
have, on occasion, needed to build a package or two from source in
order to patch things up.
I've also had debian bite, hard on one thing: Building redboot (a
bootloader oft used in my embedded work) on debian is impossible, for
reasons I won't fully explain here.
For this reasons, and given my technical bent, gentoo (and emerge)
seems a better solution than debian + 'apt', but even emerge pales in
comparison to
FreeBSD's 'cvsup; make world; make kernel; ...' (though 'mergemaster'
sucks rocks). Given that the gentoo original mission was to
recreate the BSD 'make' system, and the resultant de-railing when the
gentoo system started to require python in order to build, this seems
like the natural order of things.
Even 'mergemaster' isn't perfect, I recently managed to take the
FreeBSD box from 5.4 to 6.0RC1, but it needed a little 'help' via
"remote hands", since mergemaster had given me a /etc/groups
file where I was no longer in /etc/group, and I hadn't (yet)
installed 'sudo' on the box. Presto, no way to become root except
on the console.
All that said, the debian box (which is also the box that makes the
money over here at Netgate) takes the least time to administer.
You may wish to note that the machine has run 2.0, 2.2 and now 2.4
kernels. I'll update the kernel to 2.6 when I'm next in the bay
area. (this *is* *the* *production* machine here. If I fat-finger
it, I'll be on the next plane for San Jose.)
Every time I look at Fedora/RedHat, my eyes bleed. Unbuntu seems
pretty nice though.
Jim
