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

> You guys running Gentoo in production environments either have an
> infinite amount of time or else tiny little production environments.

Or they know what they're doing and how they want to do it.

> 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

You are correct, we don't give fancy names to automating our
installations (at least not that I'm aware of).

> 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

I'd fire you too considering the current tarballs are updated regularly
and keeping a local package cache and portage mirror is not rocket
science. Of course, if you require all of X and a desktop environment on
your servers, then I can't help you there.

> Gentoo has a way by now to distribute binary updates, but then what's
> the point of Gentoo?

It's a metadistribution. The entire point is to use it how you see fit
and it tries to help you do that, but it by no means holds your hand
while doing it.

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

Correct. Assuming you made your choice after trying out many other
solutions then I'd say your conclusion is quite correct. Some people
wish to fashion their own custom solution to a problem and some people
only need an out of the box solution.

Thomas

> --
> # 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
>
Received on Sat Jun 20 2009 - 13:47:02 UTC