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Gentoo On Server Considered Harmful
Siker writes in to point out his blog post — Why Gentoo Shouldn't Be On Your Server — which seems to have stirred up a lot of discussion, including a thread on the Gentoo forums. From the post: "I firmly believe in updating server software only when you need to. If you don't need new features, and things are working, why change anything? If you update anything you will undoubtedly need to update configuration files. You will need to fix things that break in the upgrade process... This is hard with Gentoo. Gentoo wants you to change a lot of stuff. It wants to be bleeding edge."
Someone tag this article flamebait because hoo-boy are the trolls going to be coming out of the woodwork for this. My prediction, around 200 comments along the lines of "You don't have to update constantly and still get the 2% performance increase from those 72 hours of compiling!!!1!!one"
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
Perhaps; accidents happen in all systems, whether Windows or Linux Distros; sometimes a library is missed or some combination of apps causes a problem even in "release"-level updates.
This is hard with Gentoo.
No it's not. Once you know what went wrong, mask the package that caused the problem, then re-emerge.
Gentoo wants you to change a lot of stuff.
No it doesn't, at least not on a server. Desktop Gentoo machines offer to update something most days but servers go weeks between updates. And, frankly, I want security updates to my servers ASAP.
It wants to be bleeding edge.
No it doesn't. There is a toggle - both global and per-package - for "bleeding edge" and it defaults to "off". You will get very little sympathy from me for running with that set on your server.
So, to recap: The poster is a moronic little self-publicising blogger who doesn't understand what he's talking about and is incapable of using even the basic Gentoo sys-admin tools (like the -p flag to emerge, for example) and decided to whine about it to /. in order to get his hit count through the roof and then strut about it to his loser blog-friends. Magic.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
If you want a server, don't use a bleeding-edge distro. Use a stable one like Debian, RHEL/CentOS, etc. If you want something up to date, then use something like Gentoo or Ubuntu or Fedora.
Is it just me, or is this an obvious conclusion?