Linux drove me to get a Mac

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

Tyler Aviss wrote:
> Anyone on the list use Gentoo? I've always wanted to try that out so
> maybe I'll have more luck, though in many cases it'll likely be
> trading one type of frustration for another, at least I've got a fast
> machine to compile on now :-)

I ran Gentoo for a while. I really wanted to like it but ended up
ditching it eventually when the promise of in-place rolling upgrades
proved to be more trouble than it was worth. It was during a glibc
upgrade that I finally threw in the towel on Gentoo. Searching the docs
revealed that with a change that big, the safest thing to do was to just
do a "nuke 'n pave", which obviates one of the purported advantages of
Gentoo. Rolling upgrades as promoted by Debian and Gentoo are quite
appealing in theory but I think in practice, especially on desktop
systems which typically have many more packages installed and more
points of potential breakage, they're problematic. I know Len is going
to argue that he has been carrying forward his Debian since Paleolithic
times but that really doesn't have much appeal for me any more. I'd
rather be able to script the installation and do a fresh install when I
need to in order to get the machine into a known good state. I think a
combination of scripted install, be it kickstart, preseed, autoyast,
whatever, and a configuration management tool like cfengine, puppet, or
bcfg2 with configuration files under version control is the way to go.

I think rolling upgrades are seen as desirable because most people
manage their systems in an ad hoc manner, a tweak here, a fiddle there
and pretty soon, their system is so highly-customized that rebuilding it
from scratch becomes a Herculean effort. As long as the rolling upgrade
works flawlessly, which it very well might in many cases, all is well.
When it breaks though, you're going to spend more time recovering from
that mess than you would have had you used a more disciplined approach
of scripted install, configuration management, and revision control of
configurations.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis
1419-3266 Yonge St.
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

<http://dinamis.com>
+1 416-410-3326
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