Linux drove me to get a Mac

[Jamon Camisso]

CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> 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.

dpkg --get-selections and dpkg --set-selections will let you do a fresh
install and then grab whatever the previous system (where you did
get-selections) had marked as installed. And aptitude dist-upgrade
between releases is absolutely a joy to work with, on a desktop, laptop,
server etc. I haven't run into a problem yet using aptitude and etch
when it was still the testing release.

Jamon
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