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ahmadster
n00b
Joined: 11 Aug 2003
Posts: 39
Location: Issaquah, WA
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 Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2003 6:17 am Post subject: What Redhat's move means for Gentoo |
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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
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Lovechild
Advocate
Joined: 17 May 2002
Posts: 2858
Location: Århus, Denmark
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| Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2003 6:22 am Post subject: |
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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. |
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Barkotron
Apprentice
Joined: 05 Aug 2003
Posts: 253
Location: location, location.
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| Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2003 11:35 am Post subject: Re: What Redhat's move means for Gentoo |
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| 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?
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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.
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TPC
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 16 Sep 2003
Posts: 135
Location: Sweden
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| Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2003 12:59 pm Post subject: |
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| 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? |
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QPegasus
n00b
Joined: 27 Sep 2003
Posts: 42
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| Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2003 3:22 pm Post subject: |
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Total number of packages available: 5816
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Mystilleef
Guru
Joined: 27 Apr 2003
Posts: 561
Location: Earth
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| Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2003 4:54 pm Post subject: |
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Apart from Debian, I think Gentoo has the largest repository of packages. For a young project, the gentoo community should be proud of themselves.
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Koon
Retired Dev
Joined: 10 Dec 2002
Posts: 518
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| Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2003 6:14 pm Post subject: Re: What Redhat's move means for Gentoo |
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| 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.
| Quote: | | 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 |
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charlieg
Advocate
Joined: 30 Jul 2002
Posts: 2149
Location: Manchester UK
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| Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2003 1:07 am Post subject: Re: What Redhat's move means for Gentoo |
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| 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.
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