Why Gentoo is good and unusable at the same time

smash · n00b Joined: 04 May 2002 Posts: 10

Hi,

I love Gentoo. I always prefer to use source installs and portage makes it soooo easy. It is also very nice to be able to keep packages up to date easily.

Although, I don't see how I could use gentoo on a server where stability and reliability is a must. Basic system packages are often updated by portage and "baselayout" is often modified. This can causes many troubles.

I've seen people suggesting a split of the portage tree. For all the base system ebuilds, there would be a CURRENT and STABLE branch. For all the other apps, only a CURRENT branch, like right now. This is how FreeBSD works (/usr/src as many branches while /usr/ports only one).

Also, anybody using Gentoo in server environment? Any stability problems related to package updates?

hbbio · n00b Joined: 21 Apr 2002 Posts: 38 Location: Paris, France

Hi. I'd also like to have branches tagged, it could just be an extra variable in ebuilds, so that portage can find the appropriate version.
Something similar would be cool : an upgrade umergency rating let's say on a scale of 3 :
- 0: just a build fix, if it built for you, then no need to upgrade
- 1 : new features
- 2 : bugfixes
- 3 : important bugfixes.
Each emergency is based towards previous version, so that we can determine an emergency toward the installed package. Let's say for example you have 1.1.1 installed, there has been 1.1.2 (emergency 1), 1.1.3 (e2) and 1.2.0 (e1) : then yuor emergency is 2.
Of course, you would then be able to threshold what packages you want to upgrade...
That would be neat and just for gentoo

sven · Apprentice Joined: 19 Apr 2002 Posts: 274

Well, I don't quite get you... You don't have to update if a new package is released ...

"Never change a running system"

Why updating if everything works fine?

smash · n00b Joined: 04 May 2002 Posts: 10

Well, its nice to keep a system up to date. If there would be a current and stable branch, this would ensure minimal problems/bugs when upgrading to the latest stable. This is obvious and the advantages of such design are not questionable in my opinion.

hbbio · n00b Joined: 21 Apr 2002 Posts: 38 Location: Paris, France

"If it ain't broken don't fix it..."
but what if it's broken ?
That why it's great to only integrate bugfixes, while allowing new features for end-apps (like abiword for those stupid files I have to read from mail)... There's nothing like that in gentoo, the only easy way is to update everything to its utmost latest version, which can be not as stable as the previous one...

lk42pro · Posted: Sun May 05, 2002 3:08 am Post subject:

I did a emerge rsync; emerge --update world like last nite and u know what, my mysql emerge broke.....i think the packagers need to do a better job with checking its setted up properly or else don't release it...i feel a lil unsafe now about keeping up to date with the newest release....last time this happened was when i tried to update world after a new version of libpng came out...i think a stable portage tree is a good idea....and another up to date portage tree...
_________________
"I am a wanderer, It's time for me to wander again"

Jesse · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Apr 2002 Posts: 148

Several point in cases:
1) I still have a friend cleaning up his box from the libpng mess.
2) emerge crashed when portage failed emerging portsentry (i think)... left several 'uninterruptable sleep' processes running. His box later went down/crashed: the kupdated (kernel process) decided to poop out
3) There was a slight mess with gettext being upgraded and then downgraded to fix some libintl.h probs...

AND... (well forgive me I havent searched in a while) there is still no easy/quick way to find out what the heck patches are used in the kernel sources...

I now NEVER update anything with the word 'lib' in it and NEVER emerge anything the day it comes out. I wait till i can monitor this forum for those unfortunate enough to not take 'patience is a virture' seriously ...

But i still love gentoo

It's so nimble, and me coming from slack taught me that you DO NOT have to be _completely_ up to date to have a kick butt system...

dArkMaGE · Apprentice Joined: 20 Apr 2002 Posts: 152

just keep in mind gentoo is a very new system and so things like multiple branches and double and triple checking additions are things that will come down the road
also, gentoo is meant to be a rather bleeding edge distro... if security and stability are an absolute must, then debian may better meet your needs

arkane · l33t Joined: 30 Apr 2002 Posts: 918 Location: Phoenix, AZ

Actually, I thought the whole philosophy of gentoo was source code compiling (optimization for your processor) and the ability to gain control of your system once again...

I didn't see anything in any of the PR about being bleeding edge...

Guest

STiAT · Posted: Mon May 06, 2002 1:20 pm Post subject:

...nerver touch a running system!!

i still run debian 2.2r3 on my servers. My desktop is gentoo, and i am very happy with gentoo as a desktop system.

May, i will try using one gentoo machina as a test server for you, and will say how that one works

.. but i think the stabillity of a debian system is hard to beat!

horza · Guest

I too would like to see a CURRENT and STABLE version of the portage, with a simple way of marking which each app is to be in a global configuration file by changing a field or flag. It's important to have certain apps as stable (eg MySQL) and others bleeding edge (eg mplayer) but we want to retain the simplicity of one update command.

Phillip.

chadh · Posted: Mon May 06, 2002 6:42 pm Post subject:

Look, Portage (and the Portage tree) is simply meant to facilitate users as they install packages on their system. Gentoo is a meta-distribution, and I can almost guarantee you that there will be no branching of the portage CVS tree. Portage is extremely powerful if you understand it, and it has the ability to deal with different sets of packages through profiles.

What we really need is for someone to maintain a stable profile. That is essentially what a distribution based on Gentoo would look like: a list of stable package versions and possibly some window dressing to distinguish it from other profiles.

Doing an emerge --pretend world on your server using the default-1.0 profile is just not very smart. As many people have mentioned, if it works and you don't need any security fixes or new features provided by an upgrade, then don't touch it. On the other hand, if you want to aid in development, then by all means do it, and report any broken ebuilds or other bugs on https://bugs.gentoo.org .

If you are interested in maintaining a stable Gentoo profile, feel free to get in touch with the Gentoo development team (heck you could message me to get the ball rolling).
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Chad

smash · n00b Joined: 04 May 2002 Posts: 10

I totally agree. The portage "profiles" feature would be perfect for this and I am positive that someday there will be stable profile.

I am not familiar enough with portage yet to maintain a stable profile myself but this is definately something that I'd be interested to do eventually if other people are interested.

steveL · Guest

Where is the profile in the portage tree?
I'm interested in taking a look at this file?

chadh · Posted: Mon May 06, 2002 7:44 pm Post subject:

tod · Posted: Mon May 06, 2002 7:48 pm Post subject:

Hi!

Profiles are subdirectories that can be found under /usr/portage/profiles

Note that /etc/make.profile is a symlink to the profile used currently by your system, most likely /usr/portage/profiles/default-1.0

hth

tod

Guest · Posted: Wed May 08, 2002 1:45 am Post subject: I agree we want a stable tree!

You know I find in this line of work it's very hard to maintain a good balance between "tried and true" and "bleeding edge". You have to give credit to the guys that are still running 2.2 kernels because sure, they might not have the latest and greatest media codec in their mplayer, but I bet they have 400 days or so of uptime...

I personally run Gentoo on my company's webserver which also hosts about 10 domains on it. I've had good stability recently, but there was one particularly nasty upgrade that taught me my lesson, the recent Apache architecture change totally blew away my Apache config... (yeah, so much for protecting the /etc/httpd folder with a .keep, the new Apache config just changed it to /etc/apache and happily ran using the default .conf file).

My solution: Two hard drives in the box and a shell script that does a find / -print -mount | cpio -pdm /dev/hdc1 (backs up) from one hard drive to the other. I _always_ run backup.sh right before an emerge --update world, and I also don't update world more often than once every couple of weeks or so.

Gentoo is a great system, but until Linux users in general get away from the "look this is so cool, I can do this" argument and gravitate towards the more traditional "it's been running for 10 years straight and we never need to upgrade" argument, it will be a while before Linux and especially meta-distros like Gentoo reach mainstream popularity.

prolific · Apprentice Joined: 19 Apr 2002 Posts: 237

qsc33 · n00b Joined: 20 Apr 2002 Posts: 4 Location: Boston, MA

I myself have made a couple of posts and a few emails about how difficult it is to implement gentoo in a production enviroment. It is almost impossible to convert my 50+ linux servers from debian to gentoo and maintain some form of standard install while the source tree is a moving target... especially if there is a couple of weeks between the first and last machine.

Alot of us have suggested splitting the branches into a STABLE and UNSTABLE, or something similar. This request seems to be taken rather half-heartedly, so here is what you can do on your own side.

I took my first machine and made it an rsync server and then populated it from the "Gentoo" server and used that to build my production boxes from once I made sure everything worked.
This allows me to ensure that box 1 is the same as box 53. This weekend I am going to make a new branch that will sync up to the "Gentoo" servers and will be labeled UNSTABLE. I can then merge the selected package on a test box to make sure nothing breaks before moving it to my production enviroment.

All of us should remember one thing while we are whining and complaining about how there is no sense of stability in gentoo, this is LINUX. If you are afraid of a little work to build your network or desktop for that matter or you want someone else to fix all your problems then maybe you should use SuSE.. you can buy it for $80 at http://www.suse.com.

Thanks for listening to my rants..........

Dale Russell