Comment by cies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cies | Hacker News Reader

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I do not want to sound annoying, but this is how I read your very informative comment:

> Compared with Debian or Red Hat, Gentoo is really a meta-distribution. It's a nice basis for creating your own distribution.

I do not want that on my production server. We're in the $SOME_BACKEND_SERVICE business, not in the distro creating business.

> In theory, Gentoo lets you mix the latest version of some packages with well-tested, old versions of other packages and generate a release perfected for your organization.

I want a hyper stable base that is tested by the masses and when possible has some big org behind it who's supporting it (and thus very conservative when changing stuff). On top of that base I might roll my own packages or include a fringy package repository. Never I want the base to be different for everyone.

> If the Gentoo release of some package, Ceph for example, isn't as up to date as you want, you can easily update it yourself and publish a new release to your servers.

This is not too hard for any distro I've used.

> In practice, many people don't understand that Gentoo is a meta-distribution and try to run it like a simple distribution, leading to arbitrary ABI breakage and chaos. If you want to run Gentoo on servers, you need to test all upgrades on build machines before rolling them out. You need to publish your own binary packages. You need to do a lot of the testing that Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc. would be doing for you.

So may we conclude, as GP said, that running Gentoo on production servers is just not a good idea?

> I have some friends who set up their own hosting business based on Gentoo and they seem to be doing it right. Their servers are very stable.

This is a little too anecdotal for me :)

I've done my share of Gentoo, and this system in intriguing. But when I need stability, as I need for backend services, then it will not even be on the long list.

I found some similar-level intriguing features in NixOS. I'd probably still not run it for backend services, but I might be compelled to run it on the application layer in some cases.

You've correctly understood the nontrivial costs involved in trying to use Gentoo on production servers, and correctly understood that the benefits aren't relevant to your personal use-cases, or the most-common use-cases for production distributions in most industries.

I don't at all read your parent as asserting that all production deployments should make use of a meta-distribution like Gentoo, but instead describing the specialized features that are useful for some specific niches. If you have some business reason to want to run arbitrary combinations of different versions of different software together, or to more-easily manage distributing software to your platform with many different features that you sometimes want compiled out, or otherwise if a slow stable extremely-reliable distribution isn't handling your needs, you might want to consider using Gentoo instead of building all that infrastructure yourself.

That's not the case for you, or for me, and that's fine. You've described some of the reasons I also prefer a stable well-supported distribution and don't use Gentoo. My reading of your comment is saying that because you personally have no use for the benefits, therefore Gentoo is completely unsuitable for any production use ever. If I've misread your comment, and you were just commenting on your personal use cases without trying to speak to any general audience, I apologize for my mischaracterization.

It depends on the application. I can easily imagine supercomputers running Gentoo, since Gentoo lets you build the world with risky optimization flags that just might work for you. I can also imagine high-security environments using Gentoo because Gentoo lets you eliminate unnecessary dependencies that may be a security risk.

But honestly, I think most people who run Gentoo do it for the learning experience and for fun. :-)

> I can easily imagine supercomputers running Gentoo

Yeah, nice one! Very customized flags required.

I was more talking about typical backend services, like Ceph or, say, a Riak or Postgres cluster.

You can get source rpms for say Centos or Scientific Linux and maintain your own set of patches and flags.

Minimise your deviation from the stable stuff that everyone else is using.

Which I expect is more common in super computers.

But still, maybe there is some stuff with special processors that needs all to be compiled specifically with support for that type of thing, in order to make proper use of the underlying machine.

>> Compared with Debian or Red Hat, Gentoo is really a meta-distribution. It's a nice basis for creating your own distribution.

> I do not want that on my production server. We're in the $SOME_BACKEND_SERVICE business, not in the distro creating business.

A lot of companies know that Google and Facebook have their own distros. Ergo, to become as successful, they too must build their own distro.

I know this comment was probably sarcastic, but it's also a good teachable moment: what did those huge companies with heavily customized distros base their distros on before they started customizing? You'll find a lot of RHEL/CentOS/Debian core in those lists, not much Gentoo or similar. The stability (and stability-emphasizing philosophy) of those original base distros will permeate customizations for years to come.

The most notable exception to this would be Chrome OS (which also served as a starting point for CoreOS and, IIRC, Google's container OS).

This hasn't stopped Google from using a Debian variant internally as a desktop OS, so they all kind of have their place depending on what you intend to build.

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