[GRLUG] FOR SALE - 16-Cores, 128GB RAM, 3.2TB, RAID, 2xFX4500 Graphics

[Michael Mol]

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 4:37 PM, john-thomas richards<jtr at jrichards.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 04:14:24PM -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
>> I didn't arrange for any meaningful benchmarks.  I don't really think
>> there is such a thing, either.
>>
>> My two big reasons for using Gentoo are the incremental upgrade
>> philosophy (no apt-get dist-upgrade every six months, no reinstall of
>> a new annual release), and that I often need to be on the bleeding
>> edge versions when I do thinks like media processing.
>
> The idea of an apt-get dist-upgrade (or aptitude full-upgrade) *is* an
> incremental upgrade.  Since you cited a dist-upgrade as opposed to just
> an upgrade I assume you were not running stable (since stable doesn't
> allow upgrades that could remove apps, hence no need for a
> dist-upgrade).

I wasn't referring to Debian, I was referring to Ubuntu.  I'd rather
avoid Debian-vs-Ubuntu debate at the moment, though; I don't feel like
playing devil's advocate, and Debian-vs-Ubuntu debates are more
politic and difference in philosophy than actual technical merit.

> When I ran Testing (and will again soon) I ran
> dist-upgrade on a frequent basis (three or four times a week), thus
> getting the incremental upgrade.  One could use the same argument
> against Gentoo that you are using against Debian, ie, I prefer Debian's
> incremental upgrades over rebuilding Gentoo every six months.

I wasn't using it against Debian.  You made that leap yourself.

>
> Now "bleeding edge" may well be a reason to not run Debian.  Debian
> Sid (Unstable) has only had the 2.6.30 kernel for a short while.
> Testing is *still* on 2.6.26 (as is Stable).  It would be difficult to
> argue that Debian (proper) is anywhere near bleeding edge.  It's
> possible to add unofficial Debian repositories but you would lose the
> quality control of Debian in doing so.

For the most part, Debian unstable and Ubuntu had the packages I
needed at any given time, but there'd always be that one program that
had a bug that was fixed upstream, or that I had to compile the
upstream version myself to get a feature that Debian or Ubuntu had
decided put them in too much of a liability, or that I had to compile
the upstream version myself so that I could track down the bug myself.
(Numerous programs for the first example, numerous multimedia apps for
the second, and the third had me crawling through the source of
mediatomb, then x264, then ffmpeg, then libavcodec before I found the
bug--Failure to set a sentinel value when faced with bad data.)

Recompiling Deb packages is as easy as apt-get build-dep, apt-get
source, and then a couple more commands.  Recompiling Debian packages
based on upstream sources with the distro-localized changes is
relatively non-trivial.

I bump up against the bleeding edge every now and then because I'm
always trying new things, always playing around with something I
haven't played around with before, and always stepping outside the way
developers expected their software to be used and abused.  I'm not a
technological conservative, I'll push things until they break.

But I know this, and so if something's broken, I get stubborn and try
to *fix* it.  That's one reason I love running Linux.

>
>> I did blog on the subject about a week ago:
>> http://mmol-6453.livejournal.com/144877.html
>
> Gentoo is far too much work for my tastes.  Debian Just Works (for me).

As I said in the blog post, I don't know that I know anyone I'd
recommend Gentoo too.  It does indeed require a lot of work and
low-level knowledge to get running, and the systemic benefits it
grants aren't really useful for everyone.

-- 
:wq