On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 12:05:38AM -0400, A. Khattri wrote: > I am a programmer and a systems administrator who has been using Linux > since it started (on a 486DX PC!). I was a long-time RedHat user and > dabbled in Debian and a few other distros.
Then I would assume you understand why a source-based distro is *not* Enterprise-quality. > Needless to say, I have been converting all of my servers to Gentoo (I > work for an ISP so these servers are in production in an "enterprise"-like > environment). I have great performance, reliability and simple updates - > all of the things that are important to "enterprise" customers. Except you cannot do good QA on source-based packages, because there are too many variables involved. You build a binary, test the hell out of it. If it works as it's supposed to, you release it. If not, you patch, rebuild, and test again. You also don't change software revisions within the stable release unless you absolutely need to -- you backport bugfixes to minimize breakage. If there's a vuln in kernel 2.6.8, you don't move users up to 2.6.11, you fix 2.6.8, and test to make sure the patch doesn't affect other applications. I understand that this is *very* difficult to do with Linux and BSD. You end up with a rapid release cycle (like Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake, etc.), or stable, but dated packages (like Debian stable, RedHat Enterprise, and SuSE Enterprise). The third option is the OpenBSD/Ubuntu release-every-six-months cycle. When I setup a machine, I expect the install to last two years, not six months. The lack of patches for legacy installs, too, is a problem. I have about eighteen months to migrate approximately 20 FreeBSD 4.x boxes, most of which are less than two years old. Yet, I did a consulting job a few weeks back, where I worked on some Sun machines that have been running Solaris 8 since they were installed new in 1999 or 2000. Sun still distributes patch clusters for these machines, and they don't break *anything* when I install them. Furthermore, the applications running on these machines will probably run just fine on shiny new boxes running Solaris 10...no binary modification needed. I have a copy of WordPerfect 8 for linux that I bought in 2000, and I've never been able to get it to install on a distro newer than Debian Potato, or RedHat 6. All that said, Gentoo (and any Linux distro) has enterprise-level *features*. They may be sufficient for your purposes. But the quality is not the same. There's just really no comparison. -- S. Bergeron, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
