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Shadow Skill
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 13, 2006 9:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Think about it if you position the scroll bar properly it will end up lining up with the text you are trying to read, but because it is pretty much stuck on the right side of the screen with LTR languages you end up having to line up the bar with the last word on a line and would basically have to read backwards in order to keep your place instead of being able to just line the bar up with the origin of the next line which would make it at least a bit harder for you to loose your place when reading.

Think of the scrollbar as a ruler or other straight edge that one might use to help line something up or focus on a specific area and you should better understand my point. Using your finger (or in our case the mouse pointer) isn't nessecarily the best way to keep place in text because the finger can easily drift to the wrong line the scrollbar can and does act as a stable straight edge that can be used to help maintain proper line position.

If you can't or shouldn't use the bar in this manner there is no real point to even having the scrollbar at all because it is very easy to tell when something can move down more. Besides half decent browsers allow one to scroll with the space bar or up/down arrows or pageup/pagedown keys, and it is increasingly more common to have mice that have scroll wheels. Also there are methods of emulating scrollwheel functions with a mouse that only has two buttons or even one button. [Mouse gestures, the "right" way to use a pointing device.]

The only other way I can think of to address the issue is to take a page from programming text editors and provide a way for the active line to be highlighted without the user having to "physically" select the text with the mouse but I am unsure how complicated such a method would be and it is (should be) far easier to just change the position of the scrollbar for most programs even though active line highlighting is theoretically far more effective assuming it could be implemented.

As it is if I can't move the scrollbar to make it useful I would like be able to just turn it off entirely in the programs I use as its current position renders it completely useless.
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 14, 2006 1:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Shadow Skill wrote:
Think about it if you position the scroll bar properly it will end up lining up with the text you are trying to read, but because it is pretty much stuck on the right side of the screen with LTR languages you end up having to line up the bar with the last word on a line and would basically have to read backwards in order to keep your place instead of being able to just line the bar up with the origin of the next line which would make it at least a bit harder for you to loose your place when reading.


Well, it may be the case for English, but not all language start from left to right. I also think there can be better heirarchy for the folders, but I don't think usr should be changed to Programs. kernel src under Programs does not seems very relevant. There are also people who don't know English, so it still wouldn't make any sense.

Maybe a better solution is that users (users in users group) will have path name encapsulation, they can only see path that they need to know and all the path name will be localized. Maybe it can be done in the filesystem level with ACLs. As for administrator, they should have enough knowledge to know what is /usr, /etc, /lib, ... but /usr is indeed getting too big, especially /usr/share
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 14, 2006 6:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thats an interesting idea you floated about the FS hierarchy it'd be interesting to see if it could be pulled off.

The fact that not all languages are LTR is the reason that the user should have total control over where the scrollbar is positioned without me having to destroy my localization [this is assuming that changing my locale would result in the scrollbar position changing.] which is what I really want.
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W3BMAST3R101
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 21, 2006 7:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

hanoman wrote:

:arrow: The documentation is ROCK Solid


I'd have to agree. The docs for gentoo are among the best. People from other distros also consult them.
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supernov
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 1:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Very much so indeed. Although I've had my share of problems with Gentoo as well, it is still my choice of distro.
When I tried some of the others, I got the feeling of a better running system, but less control over it. Perhaps not justified, but Gentoo simply expects you to have some knowledge about your entire system. And I like that, I like to learn and to become technically an expert. It takes huge amounts of time, but it benefits one so much for the future, when Linux becomes really popular, I can solve (and probably any Gentoo-user) almost all problems people might encounter when using a Windows-like-easy-to-use Linux system. Voila, new job! :)

That being said, it makes Gentoo a little bit of a hobby-system. But if you have a completely stable core, don't try to have everyting bleeding edge...no reason for it whatsoever, just update a major software package now and then. It's all about trying to sooth the human urge of the "Gimme gimme gimme! Shiny shiny shiny new!"-factor.
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 01, 2007 7:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

muhaaa , getting tired of these people...they should learn how to learn ;)
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 02, 2007 1:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

QUESTION: Is Gentoo ready for professional environment? Should I recomend it:

1. For a server running mission critical applications?

2. To be used as desktop computers in an office?

Or is Gentoo mission to be a great distribuction to learn Linux, but not the best to run on your production server?

I used it at home, but I switched to something else (I didn't say godbye, I just left). When I left it wasn't ready to be used professionaly -- I want to know if things changed. I won't say what are the problems (you know what they are).
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Mgiese
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 02, 2007 1:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Drysh wrote:
QUESTION: Is Gentoo ready for professional environment? Should I recomend it:

1. For a server running mission critical applications?

2. To be used as desktop computers in an office?

Or is Gentoo mission to be a great distribuction to learn Linux, but not the best to run on your production server?

I used it at home, but I switched to something else (I didn't say godbye, I just left). When I left it wasn't ready to be used professionaly -- I want to know if things changed. I won't say what are the problems (you know what they are).


dont see your point. if you want to , you can run gentoo as stable server, you just take the package version(same as in other bin-distros) thats stable and compile(emerge) it. same for desktop use. nobody forces you to do updates all the time. and linux is in general much more stable and reliable as wxxxxxx, so why it should not run for a long time. in my place i update the systems all the time, for speed, for learning purposes and security issues, but if i would have an internet root server, i also would take gentoo as my choice of os, i just wouldnt update it so often. only for security reasons, and there GLSA comes in the play. if i go to forums.gentoo.org, you can see the latest GLSA, and theres also glsa-check.... its in your hands how serious you are handling your security issues..


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jonnevers
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 02, 2007 2:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Mgiese wrote:

dont see your point. if you want to , you can run gentoo as stable server, you just take the package version(same as in other bin-distros) thats stable and compile(emerge) it. same for desktop use. nobody forces you to do updates all the time. and linux is in general much more stable and reliable as wxxxxxx, so why it should not run for a long time. in my place i update the systems all the time, for speed, for learning purposes and security issues, but if i would have an internet root server, i also would take gentoo as my choice of os, i just wouldnt update it so often. only for security reasons, and there GLSA comes in the play. if i go to forums.gentoo.org, i can see the latest GLSA, and theres also glsa-check.... its in your hands how serious you are handling your security issues..
greeds


i agree. if you are the least bit competent, you should be able to run a stable and secure production level server regardless of the OS. if you can't, do what the rest of these thread starters do and blame [insert arbitrary OS].
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Drysh
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 02, 2007 8:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Possible: Yes
Easy: No

Sorry, I need a system easy to manage. If you said that the problems with using Gentoo in a production enviroment are solved, I would try. But saying it is possible won't solve my problems (and neither convince my boss). Debian for production, Gentoo to play.

Thanks.
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 4:26 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Drysh você tá maluco cara :P Debian é para meninas, muahahaha

Gentoo rocks. For me. It's religious. I have no choice. :)

Come on guys, so many distros out there. Choose your one. Give your suggestions. But.. Don't write this crap :)
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 06, 2007 7:26 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

AlterEgo wrote:
My maintenance time (not compile time :wink: ) is less than 5 minutes a week.

This is totally strange and I cannot understand such statements. If you do maintenance only 5 minutes a week you don't update anything. At least compiling a new kernel needs 30 minutes for editing configuration between different kernel releases.

I'm absolutely upset by gentoo-anything. Just type in «rosegarden» in package.gentoo.org and look for «Similars». What has faac to do with Rosegarden? Next thing is submount, have a look at the howto, someone wrote a note that it will be removed soon, but what is the replacement, where to go from here? And I totally agree with the initiator of this thread: QA makes packages stable that require unstable/testing packages. To run tomcat or even X-Server one needs 20 or more entries in package.keywords.

I chose gentoo because of fast package updates, so I wont solve this «mess» by not updating (emerge -u world instead of emerge -uD world). The main problem of any Linux distribution, more or less severe, is a missing direction. Micros~1 knows where to go, Linux distros do not, just add 10.000 packages, some «new» installing software and make it 1.0 somehow. The kernel hackers don't see this problem, their «chiefs» say go or no-go and that's it. Not only remove functionality, but replace it, not only insert testing-code and make it stable somehow but follow a timeline (apache.org).

I don't want to blame the gentoo-philosophy of self compiled packages but I'm totally pissed if a package fails to compile, tells me there's no opengl-library and the sollution is «just switch to xorg-x11 opengl, compile and switch back» THIS IS NOT A SOLUTION, THIS IS A WORKAROUND and a pile of workarounds is called bullshit. Gentoo's full of it.

All Tuxers blame Micros~1 for their «Bad Attitude» with software, but I can drag and drop an image from the Explorer to Photoshop, edit it, copy and paste to OpenOffice and all I needed was 1 hour of installation. To achieve this with gentoo you need 3 hours and a basic idea of how the GNU toolchain works - this is not the way you inspire and convince people to use gentoo. (Now don't start a discussion 'bout security, a well configured DSL-router makes all other mechanisms obsolete and how are you connected to the internet, dial up, satellite, laser link?)

I've filed numerous bugs, most of them were solved, some of the unsolved bugs only refer to uncommon libs and progs like snd, wxGTK and realtime-lsm. I won't post any more bugs, I just try to invest only 80minutes every 3months to keep it up to date, somehow...
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 06, 2007 2:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Onkobu wrote:
stuff

your complaints are all over the place. I don't know though, none of what you said is worth actually dealing with as individual points.
it amounts to "gentoo sucks, kthxbye". maybe gentoo is just too hard for you, it happens. There are easier to manage loonix distros.
no one is holding a gun to your head saying, "i don't care if stage 1 isn't supported, you chroot in NOW and bootstrap.sh...!"

but anyway. at least you least you got your well reasoned and non-anecdotally supported arguments out in the open for everyone to debate.
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 06, 2007 2:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Onkobu wrote:
AlterEgo wrote:
My maintenance time (not compile time :wink: ) is less than 5 minutes a week.

This is totally strange and I cannot understand such statements. If you do maintenance only 5 minutes a week you don't update anything. At least compiling a new kernel needs 30 minutes for editing configuration between different kernel releases.


Try ten. And that's major updates, which don't happen weekly, and I rarely touch for some time after release.

Quote:
QA makes packages stable that require unstable/testing packages. To run tomcat or even X-Server one needs 20 or more entries in package.keywords.


QA does not do that. And I don't know about tomcat, but you can run X without any entries in package.keywords. I have NO X related entries, excluding nvidia-drivers, in package.keywords.
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 14, 2007 9:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

@alistair

actually that tag based filesystem is a nice idea...

Quote:

The most intuitive file system would be tag based. Where to create a file you would have to select the tags that apply to it and then the directory structure of this file would relate to the tags

therefore

/programs/games/fps/blah.exe == /fps/games/programs/blah.exe == /games/fps/programs/blah.exe

this allows any user to find a file really easily as there is no directory order.


I could imagine a directory, say /find/, that contains some sort of pseudo filesystem that contains symlinks, provided by e.g. a daemon that works a bit like beagle. In that way you could just dig into a tree of keywords to find what you need...
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 15, 2007 7:12 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

To all the people here, who again and again say that someone has not to update all the time his Gentoo system:

This is simply not true!

You have to update, just because of security reasons. (And with update here I mean to get the new portage tree.)
And with every new portage tree I get new versions of the packages. That is the problem with Gentoo.

If I install a Gentoo server with only the - so called - stable packages, and then just look out for security updates,
and such a security update comes then I get in Gentoo a whole new package - the new version of the package with
the security fault patched out -. And in many - if not most - times this new package brings in new libraries.

If I want a setup a server then this server has to have only the same packages with the same version compiled with always
the same compiler and so on.


Tell me, please, how you can establish something like that in Gentoo.

Ohh, is not possible?

Then don't always tell the people that it is possible to make a server. Yes, it is possible to set up a computer that responds to
requests over a network. But this is not a server. A server has some more quality factors.


So with that all said: This very long thread here just shows the wish of all the Gentoo people who want to run a real server
- not just a responding machine - with their favorite distro to the Gentoo developers that finally a real stable portage tree is needed.
We want Gentoo on the real servers, we want to run our favorite distro.
But not with the ever updating portage tree.
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 15, 2007 9:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have been running a Gentoo windows domain PDC (samba, LDAP, fileserver, proxy, gateway, app-server) with 10+ clients in a production environment for more than 3 years with very little maintenance requirements (average 2h/month?), administering it remotely for 95% (from 500 km distance), with almost no problems.

I don't see the problem in updating libraries or the system in general, since the dependency system of portage is quite robust, and changes are usually small. In worst case you'd have to rebuild a package depending on an updated library, and even that is semi-automatic (revdep-rebuild), or slightly change a config file.
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 15, 2007 2:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

metacircular-evaluator wrote:
If I want a setup a server then this server has to have only the same packages with the same version compiled with always the same compiler and so on.

look. seriously.

if you are competent you can run a server with ANY operating system. PERIOD.

you seem like someone that wants to run 'emerge -uDpv world' on your server and have it be perfect all the time. well guess what, thats not how real administrators do their work.

If you want consistent software then YOU need to take responsibility and control the system.. not let portage do whatever it wants.

you selectively update SPECIFIC packages as the need arises. such as when a security update is needed or some very useful feature has been well-implemented.

You sound like you need your hand held 100% of the time, chances are you shouldn't even be an admin. This isn't gentoo's fault this is your fault.
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 17, 2007 4:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

W3BMAST3R101 wrote:
hanoman wrote:

:arrow: The documentation is ROCK Solid


I'd have to agree. The docs for gentoo are among the best. People from other distros also consult them.



They do? and your proof is......?
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 27, 2007 2:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

jonnevers wrote:
metacircular-evaluator wrote:
If I want a setup a server then this server has to have only the same packages with the same version compiled with always the same compiler and so on.

look. seriously.

if you are competent you can run a server with ANY operating system. PERIOD.


Depends on how competent and what type of ``server'' you're talking about; I challenge someone to run a web server off of an RTOS on a microcontroller for example :) But, really, yeah, you're right, if you try hard enough, you can get apache/ssh/blah to run on any decent PC OS and even some crappy ones, i.e., Windows.

jonnevers wrote:

you seem like someone that wants to run 'emerge -uDpv world' on your server and have it be perfect all the time. well guess what, thats not how real administrators do their work.

I'd hope the emerge *would* always work with that ``-p'' flag in there! Hehe.

jonnevers wrote:

If you want consistent software then YOU need to take responsibility and control the system.. not let portage do whatever it wants.

Definitely!

nebula8080 wrote:
W3BMAST3R101 wrote:
hanoman wrote:

:arrow: The documentation is ROCK Solid


I'd have to agree. The docs for gentoo are among the best. People from other distros also consult them.



They do? and your proof is......?


Yeah, I've got buddies who've used Gentoo documentation for Arch and Ubuntu. I've read Gentoo docs when installing other distros (on my laptop; the PC has seen just Gentoo for over 3 years). Then again, I've read Ubuntu and Redhat documentation on occasion for handling Gentoo problems. However, in my 7 years of Linux experience, the last three focused mainly on Gentoo, I've been very (happily) surprised with the Gentoo documentation -- it's like none other, in my opinion.
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 27, 2007 2:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

sageman wrote:
jonnevers wrote:

you seem like someone that wants to run 'emerge -uDpv world' on your server and have it be perfect all the time. well guess what, thats not how real administrators do their work.
I'd hope the emerge *would* always work with that ``-p'' flag in there! Hehe.

:lol:
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 1:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

nebula8080 wrote:
W3BMAST3R101 wrote:
hanoman wrote:

:arrow: The documentation is ROCK Solid


I'd have to agree. The docs for gentoo are among the best. People from other distros also consult them.



They do? and your proof is......?


I don't know if this is proof;

In early 2004 I decided I should, perhaps, learn a little about the OS I had been using since '98, instead of just buying and upgrading RH/Fedora all the time.

Up until then I had literally just done the Wine-dows thing and only upgraded on each number release. All was quite stable on my home LAN, but other people started asking me to fix their setups as I had turned them onto Linux in the first place.

Anyway, I started reading everything I could about configuration, setups, different distros and what little things I could do to enhance my system.

I kept bumping into pages and/or sites written from the Gentoo point of view, easily the most readable of any pages I could find.

Because of this, in mid '04, I decided to switch distros to Gentoo, and I must say, the best thing I did regarding Linux for me. About a year later I decided to become involved in the forums rather than lurking.

YES, Gentoo is not for everyone, but, IMHO, I find portage to be far more usable than the other package maintainance systems, such as Yast or Apt and at the end of the day, I suppose I'm just a Ricer at heart anyway.
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 5:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi,

i'm also a systemadministrator and i want to say that what labrador is thinking is not always correct. He forgets one thing. In binarydistributions like debian you have a really big distribution update after two or three years where you have to update all packages and test it. This also leads to informing and supporting the users which things changed what can nearly be everything including removed or exchanged packages. I had this nightmare now for some systems like servers and clientmachines running suse or debian.
With binarysystems you need the same testingeffort as with source based distributions like gentoo, because not every update works as well as one thinks, history can tell you.
Syncing clients or servermachines with rsync and such is normal, the distribution does not matter in this case. The only extra burden is compiletime and majorchanges but only for a small amount of packages if you regularly update. So the testamount can be nicely handled. The incremental update nature of gentoo never leads to the updatehell of binarydistributions which is one of the things why we use gentoo. Flexibility is also a good point as is security. I don't know how much distributions really use ProPolice or a hardened kernel with a hardened toolchain but debian is not doing it. Gentoo can be optimized to a minimalistic and quite secure and stable system without outdated packages. And especially if you want to use a specialized apache for your needs you can ignore the binarypackage of it in nearly all cases, they are mostly compiled to crap.
Well the only problem which really is annoying are stable packages which don't work as expected because they don't compile or their testsuite failes especially on a hardened system. The high maintainance other talk about here is not really so much as one thinks, i only need one day for updates of all clients and servers including compiling/testing/rollout, the rest of the week is other special work like migration to gentoo. Well, we wrote quite some scripts to get a better automatism, this would be needed for other distributions too. So to sum up, i would say gentoo can be a very good distribution in production work if you need high flexibility and high security with only a medium to low maintainance all the time not only until the next distributionupdate which does not exist for gentoo.
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 6:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

golding wrote:
I kept bumping into pages and/or sites written from the Gentoo point of view, easily the most readable of any pages I could find.

Volume and readibility are nice, but they don't tell you anything about accuracy, which is far more important. The (unofficial, though it doesn't exactly go to great lengths to point it out...) Gentoo wiki is a great example of this. Loads of stuff is outdated and/or just plain incorrect. Don't get me wrong: I find the information on there is often a great starting point, but it's only of use to people who are knowledgeable enough to work around the parts that are bullshit. For a newbie a step-by-step HOWTO guide that's 99% accurate is still utterly useless if the bit that's omitted/wrong means it doesn't work as written. He won't have the know-how to cope.

Of course, this isn't specific to Gentoo, and you might well argue that other distros are even worse. :-) Either way, it still sucks.

LockeAverame wrote:
With binarysystems you need the same testingeffort as with source based distributions like gentoo, because not every update works as well as one thinks, history can tell you.

The flip side of the coin is that if you're using something like Debian Stable, the testing effort is far more focused and likely to be of direct benefit to you. The Gentoo devs don't have the luxury of making any assumptions as to which version of a package a Gentoo user is going to be upgrading from and to. Since the Debian upgrade path is already known in advance, it's better tested. They can just put massive amounts of effort (both automated and user testing) into making sure that updating from the version of <foo> in Stable to the version in Testing (once Testing is frozen) works correctly and with as little effort on the part of the admin as possible - automatically migrating the configuration, application data etc.

LockeAverame wrote:
The only extra burden is compiletime and majorchanges but only for a small amount of packages if you regularly update.

Fair enough - distributions like Debian Stable are for those that don't want to have to regularly update. One of the issues with Gentoo is that the longer you go between updates, the more likely you are to bump into problems - since most people do update frequently, upgrade paths from older versions of an ebuild are by definition less tested. The devs themselves probably only test upgrading from the previous version of the ebuild to the most recent one, and no more. In fact, if you wait a month or so and then update, it's perfectly possible that for quite a few of the ebuilds absolutely nobody has tested that particular upgrade path but you.

LockeAverame wrote:
The high maintainance other talk about here is not really so much as one thinks, i only need one day for updates of all clients and servers including compiling/testing/rollout

Most people seem to find it takes them only a day to upgrade from one Debian Stable release to the next.

Anyway, different strokes for different folks. :-) Gentoo and Debian cater to different crowds for the most part, as least as far as server deployment is concerned.
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LockeAverame
Tux's lil' helper
Tux's lil' helper


Joined: 14 Jul 2003
Posts: 108

PostPosted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 7:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You are absolutely right Syntaxis it depends very much on the needs of the system. For developer machines a gentoo system is often a better choice because of newer development tools against which the selfmade software can be tested against as for example sun-jdk-1.6 which can be nicely integrated thanks to java-config. For debian this mostly leads to a complete selfcompiled packagetree which we have for one machine (we will switch it). Yeah i know of the alternatives approach in debian but it is not so nice developed as the java-config part in gentoo which allows very fine grained control of which jre/jdk shall be used in which environment. Well one point with source based distributions is the maintainance afford if there are major toolchain upgrades, but this happens quite rarely especially on hardened. As others have said, tomcat is not working on sparc, well this is a special case. The sparc architecture is very new for the gentoo system and there are not very many users/developers on this platform. It's an example of the lack of manpower in gentoo so one can't blame them for this. It's really bad that i don't have the time as of now to support gentoo more in this approach as a developer.

cu
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