What Redhat's move means for Gentoo

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ahmadster · Post by **ahmadster** » Sun Dec 21, 2003 6:17 am

Hi,
I'm writting an article on Redhat's move and I would like to shed some light on the benefits of considernig Gentoo as an alternative. Ofcourse there were some pre-existing benefits that made Gentoo a real nice contender( Dependency Hell comes to mind ).

What I'm really interested in is the safty of not being stuck to RedHats servers for updates. What would prevent the Gentoo dudes from stopping all mirrors and doing the same thing as Redhat?

Thanks

Lovechild · Post by **Lovechild** » Sun Dec 21, 2003 6:22 am

dependency hell comes from two sources:

intial low pool of software
poor resolver

Fedora fixes the poor resolver with yum, and that will at some point fix the pool problem as well (at least that's the hope).

I don't think it will do dick to Gentoo's marketshare that RedHat decided to stop supporrting the community based distro (they actually still do, but not in the same way as before)

Gentoo has a good resolver and portage provides a nice pool of software, +6000 packages or something like that.

Barkotron · Post by **Barkotron** » Sun Dec 21, 2003 11:35 am

ahmadster wrote: What I'm really interested in is the safty of not being stuck to RedHats servers for updates. What would prevent the Gentoo dudes from stopping all mirrors and doing the same thing as Redhat?

This should prevent it: it's a totally different philosophy from Red Hat, or any commercial distro. Of course, there's nothing legal that I can tell (IANAL etc) to stop the devs deciding to change the social contract etc (apart from bad karma), but that, AFAIK, is exactly the same for all distros, or OSS projects. I can't really see it happening though - I'd expect a lot of the userbase to bugger off somewhere else if it did.

Switching to some kind of subscription or "enterprise" focused service for Gentoo, would in my mind mean that it just wasn't Gentoo any more.

TPC · Post by **TPC** » Sun Dec 21, 2003 12:59 pm

Lovechild wrote:Gentoo has a good resolver and portage provides a nice pool of software, +6000 packages or something like that.

I thought it was more like 4000?

QPegasus · Post by **QPegasus** » Sun Dec 21, 2003 3:22 pm

Total number of packages available: 5816

Mystilleef · Post by **Mystilleef** » Sun Dec 21, 2003 4:54 pm

Apart from Debian, I think Gentoo has the largest repository of packages. For a young project, the gentoo community should be proud of themselves.

Koon · Post by **Koon** » Sun Dec 21, 2003 6:14 pm

ahmadster wrote:I'm writting an article on Redhat's move and I would like to shed some light on the benefits of considernig Gentoo as an alternative. Ofcourse there were some pre-existing benefits that made Gentoo a real nice contender( Dependency Hell comes to mind ).

OK, let's focus on the question, folks. As a RedHat user moving his servers on Gentoo, I can tell you the advantages I see. I used apt-get on RH so the dependency hell was somewhat controlled. But I was confronted to two problems : upgrade hell and custom software/builds.

Custom software/builds : I had a RH 7.3 server but I wanted to use a LDAP-enabled Exim (and courier-imap) on it. No RPM, so I build by hand. Some other packages were not in the apt-get trees (like pure-ftpd), available as separate downloads. Upgrades became difficult to manage, because some software was just not there in the "apt-get upgrade". I had to manage everything by hand and keep track of security in each individual package.

Upgrade hell : short-term support forces you to upgrade, mostly because you don't have security updates anymore. Changes in gcc (RH7.3 -> 8 ) made the change quite painful. Custom software or builds tranformed it into a nightmare.

Now it's almost as difficult for me to build a new Gentoo server that to try to upgrade my RH 7.3 server to Fedora or RH9. I could go for Debian, but I need/like special features in compiles, which may not be in the .deb.

What I'm really interested in is the safty of not being stuck to RedHats servers for updates. What would prevent the Gentoo dudes from stopping all mirrors and doing the same thing as Redhat?

The ebuilds are GPLd, so I suppose we could fork from Gentoo and just change our rsync locations ?

-K

charlieg · Post by **charlieg** » Mon Dec 22, 2003 1:07 am

Koon wrote:Upgrade hell : short-term support forces you to upgrade, mostly because you don't have security updates anymore. Changes in gcc (RH7.3 -> 8 ) made the change quite painful. Custom software or builds tranformed it into a nightmare.

Now it's almost as difficult for me to build a new Gentoo server that to try to upgrade my RH 7.3 server to Fedora or RH9. I could go for Debian, but I need/like special features in compiles, which may not be in the .deb.

I bet you're loving portage and your USE vars then.

What Redhat's move means for Gentoo

What Redhat's move means for Gentoo

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