[CLUE-Tech] Fedora vs Debain

[Collins]

On Fri, 23 Apr 2004 20:25:46 -0600
Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com> wrote:

> (This is getting long, but I kept the context so it makes sense.  Sorry 
> all.)

Yes, but we all learn from the interchange. There so little traffic on CLUE most of the time that it shouldn't matter.

> 
> Collins wrote:
> 
> >On Thu, 22 Apr 2004 21:11:05 -0600
> >Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com> wrote:
> >
> >  
> >
> >>Collins wrote:
> >>
> >>    
> >>
> >>>I prefer Gentoo. The Social Contract is similar to Debian without the arrogance. 
> >>>      
> >>>
> >>LOL that's rich.  How about this example from the opposite viewpoint:
> >>
[ snipped ]
> >
> 
> NOW NOW... this is getting silly.  I was obviously joking and creating
> a "viewpoint" from what happens on various IRC channels ...
> I was just refuting some > of the made-up comments about Debian's
> "philosopy" that were completely contrived, by creating another
> completely contrived quotation from the Gentoo entity as I've
> perceived it over the last few years.  I can't believe you took it
> seriously! 

OK, you got me there. Without a <g> or LOL to guide me, I took it at face value. I don't spend much time on IRC, and I've found relatively little of this nonsense on gentoo-user. Sure, almost anyone who sticks with the distro likes install-from-source.


> >I honestly don't know anyone (developer or user) who has chosen Gentoo because of hype. Debian (and RedHat and SUSE ...) certainly have enough hype as well. Good results come out of Gentoo and Debian, et al.
> >  
> >
> How did they hear about it in the first place?   Word of mouth = 
> personal hype in the open-source world... 

I'm probably beating a dead horse, but I don't consider a report on Slashdot or a comment from a friend "wow dude ..." to be hype.

> >>The main thing I hope I mentioned about the Debian installer (and the 
> >>part the always holds it back) is a design issue.  It has to work across 
> >>all the platforms Debian supports.  And there's a LOT of them.

My only surprise is that Debian (one of the oldest distros) has not seen fit over the years to develop a really slick install process. Gentoo is, relatively speaking, a Johny-come-lately both with respect to install procedures and to number of platforms supported. Gentoo has a project underway to deliver a "slick" installer, but it's not ready for prime time. In the meantime, the principal installation tools are tar and other standard *nix tools, but the process is really well documented.



> >So Debian has been around for a while longer. So has Slackware. Gentoo hasn't. 
> >
> So you agree that Gentoo is going through a phase where it has little in 
> the way of documented standards?  Okay.  That *was* my point, after all.

By no means! Gentoo has a consistent, documented standard.
 

> >Sounds like you're not exactly a fan of install-from-source. I find the maintenance mostly painless. It's only when one of the mega packages (kde, etc.) enters a new cycle that thing get tedious. Even then, I just crank up the upgrade at 9PM ad sleep on it. Anything smaller, I just let it churn away while I read emails.
> >
> >  
> >
> I'm not a fan because there's zero need for it.  It's just a waste of 
> time in most cases.  One guy can just as easily compile something and 
> distribute it to others as can a hundred people compile it.  What's the 
> point? 
> 
> There have been a number of real-world studies that show the systems 
> perform about the same on the same hardware... so the whole compile from 
> source thing to me just seems to be one of those cosmetic differences 
> between distros people do just to say it's cool.  (And I'll agree that 
> it is.)
> 
> It doesn't really change the end-user experience with the finished 
> product -- other than they have to wait forever between upgrades for 
> their machine to compile things.  If the end goal is to create better 
> software for "the world", spending hours re-compiling things someone 
> else could do once seems fruitless.  That's just my opinion.  most of 
> the time some guy somewhere can compile a package "sanely" following 
> some standards (ah those standards again) and that package will work for 
> 99% of the end-users out there. 
> 

I've left in this lengthy chunk because it illustrates some of the misconceptions about Gentoo. Dan Robbins has a history of working with "optimized" distros. At the time he began work on Gentoo, most of the other distros were compiled for 386 machines, and there are definitely performance improvements to be gained on modern P4+ and Athlon+ machines with appropriately compiled code. Yes, different distros compiled for the same architecture will run about the same on equivalent hardward. That was not the primary mission, however. The essential difference in Gentoo is the Portage system which provides a standard, logical way of installing and maintaining source packages. By means of Portage, each user can optimized the system the way he wants it, and, even more importantly, each system can be continuously upgraded without the need for reinstall.

You may believe that there is Zero Need for install-from-source, but many thousands of Gentoo users (or even Linux from Scratch users) would disagree. There is absolutely Zero Need for you to waste time with Gentoo if you don't see the benefits.

The principal reasons that i run Gentoo are (1) the tremendous number of available packages (only Debian comes close) and (2) the ability to upgrade packages without suffering from subtile incompatibilities among binary packages. When I ran Mandrake a few years back, I was always amazed to find that packages produced by Mandrake Cooker would work for some users and faily miserably for others. The reason for that is that the Mandrake Cooker RPMs were prepared on systems with very current (sometimes unstable) versions of glibc, gcc, etc. They were not really meant to be run on systems with back-level libraries. RedHat suffered from similar problems in some of their (disastrous?) upgrade procedures.

Gentoo is not totally immune from this phenomenon, but most of the incompatibilities turn up at configure/compile time. When you refer to packages like KDE, the likelihood of compiling a sucessful version early in a release is pretty marginal, but Gentoo accommodates both the adventuresome and the sedentary by allowing multiple KDE versions to coexist (mostly, KDE doesn't always provide a clean upgrade path for all applications). Whereas Debian chooses to wait until the last t has been crossed for all of its platforms (frequently two major releases behind current kde), Gentoo makes the raw product available for testing in the belief that widespread testing produces a better product. I must confess that I'm not familiar with how Debian handles its unstable branches, but I have the impression that even there progress is slower than with Gentoo.

> >  
> >
> >>On servers -- I do like Debian.  Massive upgrades come along slowly
> >>long after all the weird bugs and tweaks have been figured out, and in
> >>the meantime security.debian.org is dedicated to putting out patches
> >>VERY fast for real security issues.
> >>    

There is a very basic difference in philosophy with Gentoo and servers (really for desktop systems, too). With binary distros, you expect your vendor to provide you with canned fixes that you can propogate to all servers in a farm, if they don't fall into the binary incompatibility trap <g>. With Gentoo, y-o-u (note the emphasis, not the vendor) can do the same thing. Upgrade a reference system, test the hell out of it, then propagate the binaries to your server farm. Gentoo provides the current stable packages; y-o-u control when and how you incorporate the changes.

> Yes but could I have upgraded cleanly between major releases?  
> Definitely not with RedHat.  I've personally watched RH destory 
> perfectly working systems in "upgrade" mode.  Never ever has a 
> dist-upgrade ever not warned me about anything it was going to break.  
> It's a release requirement for Debian -- and I like that.  Gentoo 
> handles it by constantly being in a state of upgrade, which makes it 
> rather difficult to put new servers in the farm later and get them to 
> the same release point easily.  Trade-offs of different philosophies, I 
> suppose.
> 
> >  

See above. It's totally under your control. You are the sysadmin.

> >Right now, I'm in a try out new things, quiet, no forest fires mode! The so called bleeding edge doesn't involve much bleeding with Gentoo. 
> >
> Sounds like you've had a better experience than I had... things were 
> constantly broken (perl, KDE, various other large packages) in the two 
> months I ran Gentoo on the desktop machine.  Maybe they got it under 
> control finally, but it turned me off big-time.
> 

Define broken. Do you mean, the package failed to install, or the package failed to run properly? KDE and GNOME will probably never be "under control," but each new version gets more bloated and "more better." I've never encountered any problems with perl, although there are some inconsistencies with perl, python, php when stepping to a new version of apache, mysql, postgresql. My experience with Gentoo is that about 1 out of 50 new packages have install problems, but most of the time before I can blink twice a developer has picked up on it and fixed it. 

Enjoy,

-- 
 /\/\
( CR ) Collins Richey
 \/\/