boomerang: back to Gentoo, 12 yrs later

Message

vap0rtranz · Post by **vap0rtranz** » Thu Dec 10, 2020 2:21 am

What's changed in the past 12 yrs that an old farting, boomeranger should know?

LTO, systemd, etc. are new. I notice some of the same folks in forums, like @NeddySeagoon, and that is great to see.

I'll be moving off of CentOS for obvious reasons (unless your head has been stuck in the sand the past 2 days).

eccerr0r · Post by **eccerr0r** » Thu Dec 10, 2020 3:43 am

I admit, my head was in the sand, but now my head is befuddled by swapping like for like...

Anyway things have gotten more complicated to better detect fine grain conflicts that will show up when you mess with per package customizations. And you still don't need to jump on the systemd bandwagon if you don't want.

figueroa · Post by **figueroa** » Thu Dec 10, 2020 4:03 am

After 12 years, everything regarding portage is significantly more reliable. Perhaps you'll tell us why you believe moving from CENTOS to Gentoo it makes sense to you at this time.

AlexJGreen · Post by **AlexJGreen** » Thu Dec 10, 2020 8:36 am

vap0rtranz · Post by **vap0rtranz** » Thu Dec 10, 2020 12:21 pm

that ^

RedHat killed off CentOS.

I didn't mean to cause any swapping (or hand sweating) about likeness between Gentoo vs CentOS; instead I meant my servers will need a new OS.

Good to hear about Portage reliability. There look to be more docs now too. Skimming through the Quick Install Checklist is dusting off some of what I remember that hasn't changed: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Quick_Inst ... _Checklist

Post by **NeddySeagoon** » Thu Dec 10, 2020 12:31 pm

vap0rtranz,

Welcome back.

Things are mostly more robust and more reliable. There is more automation too. That's a double edged sword.

revdep-rebuild, python-updater and perl-cleaner are gone. Portage does it all as it updates @world.
This means that the dependency calculation has got bigger/slower but your install is no longer broken until one or all of the above tools is run by hand.
As portage does it all in one pass, there appears to be more things to rebuild. That's an illusion, as its doing all the things you would have done by hand separately, without the downtime due to reverse dependencies being broken.

On the whole, its better.

eccerr0r · Post by **eccerr0r** » Thu Dec 10, 2020 2:53 pm

Indeed double edged sword. I think for the most part, it's no longer possible without "forcing" (i.e. options like --nodeps or --unmerge that don't check dependencies) specific updates of existing packages (like portage itself), but updating @world which includes those packages usually works.

But my initial surprised reaction still holds - Gentoo has and always has been a rolling release. If you had been running CentOS as a stable release or as something that closely tracks RHEL, this is not the right OS for you. Can't help with the latter, but Debian still is a stable release as far as I know.

figueroa · Post by **figueroa** » Thu Dec 10, 2020 3:25 pm

vap0rtranz wrote:RedHat killed off CentOS.

It's not killed off. Renamed and re-positioned with regard to Red Hat and upstream. Some people would consider it exciting. (Not me.)

If what you want are stable, predictable and long (LTS) releases, I would recommend Debian. Don't get me wrong, I've been running Gentoo servers for 15 years, and every so often, it's as exciting as a heart attack. Not so often as it was 15 years ago, and I've become a creature of habit, and I'm uber careful. The remote servers don't get upgrades until things are tested and stable on local servers.

But, personal welcome back to Gentoo. You get back a lot of control with Gentoo.

Post by Hu » Thu Dec 10, 2020 5:14 pm

OP may have decided that if he must choose between a rolling CentOS or a rolling Gentoo, he wants the extra flexibility that Gentoo brings. I expect a rolling CentOS will have most of the same drawbacks as a non-rolling CentOS (upstream picks your build options, and you live with the resulting dependencies / features / misfeatures; local patching is more trouble), with the biggest perk being more current packages. Gentoo can beat the customization limitations, and match on freshness. If he is a Gentoo veteran, then he is presumably familiar with Gentoo's drawbacks (more sysadmin time, longer install/upgrade times) and is willing to accept those.

389292 · Post by **389292** » Thu Dec 10, 2020 11:33 pm

Rolling with some grace period is OK for personal server. But source based? This I don't understand. You would have to have a proper VDS with good CPU to manage this thing without wasting time. Either way you are paying - with money for VDS, or with time waiting slow compiling.

figueroa · Post by **figueroa** » Fri Dec 11, 2020 4:12 am

vap0rtranz wrote:RedHat killed off CentOS.

After reading quite a bit more, I decided you are right. It quite stinks.

Website · Post by **Zucca** » Sun Dec 13, 2020 4:03 pm

figueroa wrote:
vap0rtranz wrote:RedHat killed off CentOS.
After reading quite a bit more, I decided you are right. It quite stinks.

Indeed. Now CentOS may be fit for workstations which require some level of stabliness.

I'll wait and see what happens to Fedora...

TechwoIf · Post by **TechwoIf** » Mon Dec 21, 2020 4:03 am

NeddySeagoon wrote:vap0rtranz,

revdep-rebuild, python-updater and perl-cleaner are gone. Portage does it all as it updates @world.
This means that the dependency calculation has got bigger/slower but your install is no longer broken until one or all of the above tools is run by hand.
As portage does it all in one pass, there appears to be more things to rebuild. That's an illusion, as its doing all the things you would have done by hand separately, without the downtime due to reverse dependencies being broken.

What replace those? emerge --some_obsure_option?

Post by **fedeliallalinea** » Mon Dec 21, 2020 6:48 am

TechwoIf wrote:What replace those? emerge --some_obsure_option?

For python only a normal update with -U/--changed-use when profile update python targets.
For revdep-rebuild see this wiki page.
Finally for perl-cleaner I don't think is gone see perl wiki page

Muso · Post by **Muso** » Tue Jan 19, 2021 8:00 am

vap0rtranz wrote:that ^

RedHat killed off CentOS.

I didn't mean to cause any swapping (or hand sweating) about likeness between Gentoo vs CentOS; instead I meant my servers will need a new OS.

Good to hear about Portage reliability. There look to be more docs now too. Skimming through the Quick Install Checklist is dusting off some of what I remember that hasn't changed: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Quick_Inst ... _Checklist

Your servers and most firewalls, switches, SIEM communication brokers, supercomputer clusters using the Maui scheduler...

This was a weird decision by RedHat.

Post by **pjp** » Tue Jan 19, 2021 6:38 pm

Muso wrote:This was a weird decision by RedHat.

Maybe, maybe not. Looks like Embrace, Extinguish.

January 2014, RH officially "supports" CentOS while it remains "independent" with a new governing board.
July 2019, IBM buys RH.

By appearance, that could easily be seen as RH "tidying up" before putting up the for sale sign.

Someone probably pitched the idea as an opportunity to nudge business use of CentOS into an RH license.

Anon-E-moose · Post by **Anon-E-moose** » Tue Jan 19, 2021 6:45 pm

They didn't kill off centos, they took it from being stable (based on fedora) to being alpha/beta (bug finder for fedora)

Post by **pjp** » Tue Jan 19, 2021 6:52 pm

My understanding was that CentOS was based on RH, not Fedora. They kept the name, but it is very clearly no longer CentOS. It was killed off and the name reused.

wikipedia wrote:CentOS is a Linux distribution that provided a free, community-supported computing platform functionally compatible with its upstream source, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

CentOS Stream is a rolling-release Linux distribution midstream between the upstream development in Fedora and the downstream development for RHEL.

Anon-E-moose · Post by **Anon-E-moose** » Tue Jan 19, 2021 7:45 pm

Sorry

I get confused, I'm colorblind in that spectrum

I knew it was based on long term stable (which most using centos want). They want RHEL, they just don't want to pay for it.
And now they know what to depend on when the price tag is free.

Indeed the new improved centos isn't the old version, stable vs rolling release.

Post by **pjp** » Tue Jan 19, 2021 9:41 pm

Anon-E-moose wrote:Sorry :oops: I get confused, I'm colorblind in that spectrum :lol:

I knew it was based on long term stable (which most using centos want). They want RHEL, they just don't want to pay for it.
And now they know what to depend on when the price tag is free.

Indeed the new improved centos isn't the old version, stable vs rolling release.

Causing confusion while keeping the name so it sounded familiar was probably intentional.

Also, and I may have misunderstood or I may be recalling incorrectly, but I believe CentOS Stream incorporates some features from Fedora that may not make it into RHEL. So it isn't even a "rolling release." It's some kind of alpha/beta hybrid testing platform.

I don't see any value in CentOS Stream for the same purpose that an organization relied on CentOS. If they weren't willing to pay RH, very few are going to start after this, especially given the previously stated EOL support timeline that was abandoned.

Anon-E-moose · Post by **Anon-E-moose** » Tue Jan 19, 2021 10:07 pm

I would imagine that keeping the name was very intentional.

I don't see much value in the new centos path, at least for 90%+ of their former users, ie most businesses.

I personally think that centos messed up by not honoring the support through the last EOL.
That's certainly not going to entice most people to try/use centos going forward.

Although maybe this is their way to just gradually shut down centos.

eccerr0r · Post by **eccerr0r** » Wed Jan 20, 2021 12:24 am

So now the question is, what next, will those single-Linux flavor platforms (things like industrial CAD tools, etc.) move off of RH because now those who want to use those applications need to license RH as well as their expensive software?

I suspect RH did this just to spite people who are using CentOS instead of licensing RHEL. They probably intended CentOS as a teaser for people to learn RHEL administration so they can then license RHEL in industry, but seems that people are opting to just use CentOS. So now they're asking them to "pay" for it by asking them to use latest and greatest software that breaks left and right, making it useless as a stable OS platform?

Post by **pjp** » Wed Jan 20, 2021 3:13 am

eccerr0r wrote:So now the question is, what next, will those single-Linux flavor platforms (things like industrial CAD tools, etc.) move off of RH because now those who want to use those applications need to license RH as well as their expensive software?

This might be a good time for a business to evaluate supporting at least two non-commercial distros.

Rocky Linux seems likely to be the best short-term option. 40 days ago, they anticipated 2 months until the first release.

eccerr0r wrote:So now they're asking them to "pay" for it by asking them to use latest and greatest software that breaks left and right, making it useless as a stable OS platform?

I've been surprised that there haven't been more commercial RHEL equivalent distributions (such as Oracle's).

eccerr0r · Post by **eccerr0r** » Wed Jan 20, 2021 4:15 am

I wonder how long Rocky or any other stable version distribution will survive without funding. Also why would industrial CAD tool companies support one, nevermind two non-commercial distributions that have no care for version stability and upgrade is the solution to fixing bugs (other than of their own software... HAH).

I also wonder if long term Linux is going the way of Windows and distributions will come with the whole gamut of libraries packaged with it like flatpak. This may be a GPL or maybe LGPL nightmare as now one is distributing GPL binaries, but it'd do away with the library mismatch problem as well.

Muso · Post by **Muso** » Wed Jan 20, 2021 6:22 am

pjp wrote:Someone probably pitched the idea as an opportunity to nudge business use of CentOS into an RH license.

It worked with some companies I know. They are just going to abandon their CentOS7 servers and switch to RH before EOL.