[PLUG] Discussion topic - Choosing to run Gentoo vs Debian or Red Hat

[Paul Heinlein]

On Tue, 22 Dec 2009, Mike Connors wrote:

> I recently had a tech interview w. an organization that runs Gentoo 
> on all its servers. Part of the interview was to login into a test 
> box, build a LAMP server, install some software and upgrade some 
> stuff.
>
> This was my first time ever doing anything w. Gentoo and I was quite 
> surprised by how different it was than say Debian or RH. Not to 
> mention the lack of good documentation or what I call "build guides" 
> that you can follow and will help you build out a server. Granted, 
> they're never perfect but can usually get you 85% or more of the way 
> home.
>
> So, my questions for discussion are:
>
> 1. Gentoo's claim to fame is that by compiling each package for the
>    specific architecture that performance gains are realized.  Has
>    anyone found this to be empirically true?

I found it to be true on my SPARC, but not so much on x86 boxen.

> 2. If I were making the decisions on which Linux distro to run, I
>    would choose one which I think would more people would tend to
>    have experience with and that has a greater mindshare such as
>    Debian or RH.

Seasoned Gentoo admins are harder to come by than Debian/RH/SuSE 
admins. If your local Gentoo guru is hit by the proverbial bus, it'll 
take that much more time for the replacement admin to come up to 
speed.

> 3. Does anyone have significant experience working on or supporting
>    Gentoo?  If so, what has your experience been?

I've only maintained a few Gentoo systems, two at home and two at 
work. All are now retired.

The big upside for me was flexibility. To install openssh-server on a 
Debian system, for instance, you've got to install several X11 
libraries as dependencies. If you don't want X on your system, and you 
don't want to compile your own sshd, you're out of luck in a 
mainstream distro. With Gentoo, it's no problem!

On the other hand...

a) It's VERY easy to get a Gentoo box into an idiosyncratic state
    with all sorts of mismatched package levels. I think a really
    good Gentoo admin could avoid that sort of mess, but it would
    take a lot of discipline and planning.

b) Package updates can be very disruptive, and those disruptions
    occur far too frequently. All of a sudden, for instance, you'll
    get a major version bump that requires reconfiguration and
    recompilation of lots and lots of packages. I don't think I
    would run Gentoo in a production environment unless I had an
    extremely accurate testing environment for staging changes.

c) Broken packages were far more common in Gentoo than in
    other distributions. That may have changed, but I grew to
    dread updates.

In short, my assessment is that the time required to build, test, and 
deploy Gentoo packages wasn't worth the mild speed gains and packaging 
flexibility it could provide.

YMMV.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/