Haven't you seen broken.rpm things? You are in about the same situation with *redhat-like systems just as with Gentoo. On the other hand - if there is some problem with update on gentoo, it won't roll in, giving you clues what is wrong, so you wouldn't end up in mess with incompatible stuff. And nobody forces you to use experimental packages or versions on production system (just set up your make.conf & keywords correctly). We run Gentoo on about 40 production servers (Clustered firewalls, proxy servers, mail/DNS/ftp/mysql/apache/php) without a single glitch. And we do upgrade when there is other a feature enhancement or security issue.
As far as I can remember, the only major upgrade which involved a lot of fuzz was migration from kernel 2.4 to 2.6 - but hey, how often do you do that, and you would definitely experience the same troubles on all other distributions.
Someone pointed out that this discussion in fact not about Gentoo, but actually about your upgrade policy - do you upgrade every single day because "well, I want to be up-to-date", or because there is a good argument that your production servers in fact MUST have an upgrade?
I'd stick to choice of distribution based on the answer to that question - if you need flexibility for users on special installation or multiple versions of some package, I'd definitely stick with Gentoo, however if you want to be a monkey that wants fully-automated blindly self-updating linux distribution - that's taking a HUGE chance that things will break down and you will end up with using a LOT of hours fixing your troubles (use whatever distribution you want for that, typically *redhat-like systems or SuSE)
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Haven't you seen broken .rpm things? You are in about the same situation with *redhat-like systems just as with Gentoo. On the other hand - if there is some problem with update on gentoo, it won't roll in, giving you clues what is wrong, so you wouldn't end up in mess with incompatible stuff. And nobody forces you to use experimental packages or versions on production system (just set up your make.conf & keywords correctly). We run Gentoo on about 40 production servers (Clustered firewalls, proxy servers, mail/DNS/ftp/mysql/apache/php) without a single glitch. And we do upgrade when there is other a feature enhancement or security issue.
As far as I can remember, the only major upgrade which involved a lot of fuzz was migration from kernel 2.4 to 2.6 - but hey, how often do you do that, and you would definitely experience the same troubles on all other distributions.
Someone pointed out that this discussion in fact not about Gentoo, but actually about your upgrade policy - do you upgrade every single day because "well, I want to be up-to-date", or because there is a good argument that your production servers in fact MUST have an upgrade?
I'd stick to choice of distribution based on the answer to that question - if you need flexibility for users on special installation or multiple versions of some package, I'd definitely stick with Gentoo, however if you want to be a monkey that wants fully-automated blindly self-updating linux distribution - that's taking a HUGE chance that things will break down and you will end up with using a LOT of hours fixing your troubles (use whatever distribution you want for that, typically *redhat-like systems or SuSE)