Re: [cobalt-users] open raq distro

[Ryan Verner <xfesty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 09/01/2004, at 3:13 AM, William J.A. Brillinger wrote:

> At 11:29 AM 08/01/2004 -0500, you wrote:
> > (Debian and Fedora seem to be the front-runners; I'm surprised 
> > no-one's advocated *BSD yet.)
>
> From what I understand of it, BSD would be my first choice based in 
> stability and security but Debain makes more sense in terms of the 
> volume of ready to go packages for additions and maintenance. (As I 
> understand it)

BSD ports
Advantages: Packages are almost always up to date, upgrades are 
/usually/ reasonably clean and painless.  Any problems are usually 
fixed quite quickly, within hours.
Disadvantages: Need to compile applications.  Can take ages and ages, 
especially on older hardware. Occasionally an upgrade does stuff up 
(such a configuration file change), and changes need to be manually 
made.  Can sometimes cause major, major headaches.

Debian Stable packages
Advantages: Prebuilt packages, installing takes a very short time.  
Packages have been very well tested (unlike ports), so upgrades are 
guaranteed pain free.  An absolute dream to administer in terms of 
having no real problems with anything, ever.
Disadvantages: Packages are often quite out of date.  Packages can 
often be a pain to maintain, especially if they have dependencies.

Debian Testing/Unstable:
Advantages: Prebuilt packages, installing takes a very short time.  
Packages have been sort of tested.
Disadvantages: Not enough testing with packages, so like ports, 
upgrades can turn into a nightmare.  Sometimes they can be more then a 
nightmare, such as in my experiences, a broken fsck rendering reiserfs 
partitions corrupted on a reboot, a broken lilo stopping a colocated 
machine from booting up, broken database packages killing database 
content.  Packages sometimes take ages to get fixed, especially with 
testing, so a broken apache could leave your web server 'dead' for a 
week until a newer package is uploaded.  Packages can often be a pain 
to maintain, especially if they have dependencies.

Then there's fink, which has attempted to kind of tie everything 
together.  Essentially, it's like ports, in the regard that you compile 
things (and its often up to date), but with installing it actually 
creates a package and installs that, so distributing packages over 
several servers is a lot easier.  Fink's often broken, though - 
conceptually, it still suffers from the same problems :-(

One of the challenges with Qbalt is to find a way to provide the 
balance between:
- Up to date packages
- But have those packages sufficiently tested, so they're guaranteed to 
work without problems

It's harder than it sounds.

R

(It's 3:30AM in the morning, so if my sentence structure is whack, you 
know why...)

--

linux.conf.au 2004 - Adelaide, Australia
             http://lca2004.linux.org.au/

"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."