Rough upgrade to FC4

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 10:24:43PM -0500, nmeyers at javalinux.net wrote:
> I drifted from RH to Mandrake (pre-Mandriva) and then to Gentoo.
> Though not without the occasional bump, I've found Gentoo's approach to
> package management the least violent of them all.

The reason for this is pretty simple: Gentoo doesn't *do* package
management in the same way that every other system does it.

The hardest part of package management is ensuring that all your
versions of your libraries match up. Postgres requires glibc
foo.bar.baz, MySQL requires, etc. When you upgrade the libraries, you
have to upgrade the programs that are built against those libraries, so
that you don't get API mismatches, and so on.

Gentoo sidesteps this whole issue: since all code is built on your
machine, it builds against whatever the current version of the library
is. You can't have a library mismatch, because `make` just grabs
whatever you currently have.

Gentoo also sidesteps configuration file updates - they simply make you
resolve the differences yourself. More than once, I've seen someone blow
away their /etc/fstab after an update of system tools on Gentoo, because
they just hit the "take all new versions", assuming Gentoo will do the
sensible thing. (Here's a hint: it doesn't.)

Installing a full system under Gentoo can take days: recently, I
bought a new webserver, and installed the exact same packages on the new
one as the old one. The set up, configuration, and download times for
all the packages totalled to about 30 minutes, after which I was able to
directly copy my /var/ into place and start serving MySQL and WWW
traffic. (I had to do a bit more playing to get mail working, because in
copying over the /etc/passwd and /etc/group files, some of the numbers
changed.)

I used to use Gentoo, but at one point, I got the system into a really
horked state: It thought that I had both a 2.4 and 2.6 kernel installed,
and refused to update any packages because of the conflicting modtools
requirements. I eventually hand installed a lot of stuff, but then that
required Gentoo installing even more crap than I already had - in the
end, I tripled my total package count for reasons I'm still not sure I
really understand. It took about 2 weeks of my free time to get it into
shape: and for a week of that (I found out later) I had broken modtools.
Had my system restarted, it would have not been able to load any
modules, because I had a 2.4 kernel and 2.6 modtools.

Gentoo is good for some things, but for agile system management, ease of
updating, and easy maintenance, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. If
you're someone who likes to hack in the system a lot, Gentoo can be
good, and it's very good if you like to download random stuff from the
web and compile it: Gentoo, since it compiles everything, has all the
development libraries installed for you, something that isn't nearly as
easy under Debian.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer