Actually, gentoo also has another method that is meant more like
debian's stable, testing (I think.. never have run debian just talk so
not positive about this)..
You can set in your make.conf your architecture to x86, this gives
"production/stable" release versions of the software.
If you want the hottest released ebuilds, you can change it globally to
~x86.
If you want specific packages to be newer and maintain other software as
production, you can set it in /var/portage/package.mask (or something),
don't have access to my gentoo atm for exact path. You basically list
the ebuild app-misc/f-spot ~x86 and then "emerge f-spot".
If you're using x86 and there is only a ~x86 version available as an
ebuild, it is listed as masked and won't install if you run "emerge
app_name".
I had stuck with production on my laptop since 2002 when I first
installed gentoo (haven't reinstalled yet) on my dell inspiron 8100.
I have had some issues with gcc updates and kernel recompiles, such that
were a bit thorny over profile changes though, nothing insurmountable
with a little time.
I have slowly allowed some ~x86 ebuilds in namely, mono and nvidia
related ebuilds.
That said, my laptop is not "production". I dink around on it, and run
it in linux when I can (dual boot xp).
Doug Taggart
Owen Berry wrote:
I think in Gentoo the stability of the package depends to a large extent
on the maintainer of the package. Since it is a continuously evolving
distribution, with no releases in the traditional sense, there is no
centralized group testing and releasing packages. Once a maintainer
feels that a new release is ready, out it goes.
I would disagree that Gentoo is notorious for releasing changes that
break things (I've had very few problems), but I would say that you
should be more cautious than with other distros when in a production
environment. When a major release happens for a package, I sometimes
wait for a few days before putting it in. This lets the dust settle
while everyone else sorts out any problems ... with such a configurable
system things are bound to be different amongst users, potentially
causing problems for some.
Also, if you can't afford downtime, I would suggest more than one
system, where you can build, install and test on one system, and then
install on the others. This way you can also build binary packages,
making it easier to revert to the older version, and avoid compiling on
all machines.
Things I like about Gentoo are it's excellent documentation (I sometimes
refer to it even when working on other distros, if applicable), the
range of packages, the ability to install bleeding edge packages, and
the flexibility. Sometimes Ubuntu tempts me though. :-)
Another thing I like is that CPAN modules can be incorporated into
your portage tree. Instead of having an ebuild for every Perl module on
CPAN, there's a script that does a certain amount of integration between
CPAN and portage, helping keep everything consistent. It drives me crazy
having a mix of RPM's and CPAN on RedHat systems.
Owen
On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 09:15:47AM -0500, William Sutton wrote:
<snip>
I don't think it is a production system. Gentoo is notorious for
releasing changes without doing thorough testing (google for the apache
1.series to apache 2.series breakages), for example.
On the whole it has a place, and installing a few Gentoo systems is a good
learning experience...I just wouldn't run one in production.
</snip>
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