Re: [dev] Suckless (*NIX|*BSD) Distribution?

On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 4:22 AM, Anselm R Garbe<garbeam_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> That way I can set up a system in a matter of 2 hours and get back to
> work again, which I want to spend my time with, mainly st and dwm
> nowadays.

Ubuntu is an utter nightmare to use on anything but a "workstation"
system. They ship broken packages, break currently-working packages,
fail to document important things (such as "we broke fai and have no
intention of fixing it"), etc. As a desktop/laptop OS, it's decent,
but in my experience less reliable than (for instance) fedora, which
these days is equal to Ubuntu in configuration ease. If I sat down an
enumerated the things Ubuntu has broken and required me to work around
and/or patch, this e-mail would blow someone's disk quota.

You guys running Gentoo in production environments either have an
infinite amount of time or else tiny little production environments.
AFAIK there's no Gentoo equivalent of FAI [1] or kickstart [2], and
without tools like that a distribution is worthless to me as a
"production" OS. Hell, even Slackware has facilities that make it
trivial to perform an automated, noninteractive rollout. Past the
installation, distributing source to machines and having them all
compile their own is a breathtaking waste of time and resources, and
I'd justly be fired if ever I tried something like that. I'd hope
Gentoo has a way by now to distribute binary updates, but then what's
the point of Gentoo?

Obviously if a distro does what you want and you're satisfied with it,
it's the "right" one.

-- 
# Kurt H Maier
[1] - http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/
[2] - http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7.3-Manual/custom-guide/ch-kickstart2.html