Linux: concerns over systemd [OT]

Wed Oct 22 00:10:04 UTC 2014

Israel G. Lugo wrote:
> On 10/21/2014 11:59 PM, Tom Hill wrote:
>> On 21/10/14 23:55, Jay Ashworth wrote:
>>> Ok, but how does it handle providing initscripts?  I gather any upstreams
>>> which used to provide them aren't anymore...
>> It's Gentoo: "You should write your own" is the most likely answer.
> Actually, not at all; although I realize that's a very common misconception.
>
> Gentoo Linux is, unfortunately, often associated with the whole "gcc
> -O9000 -msuperfast -fwtf" wow-look-at-me crowd.
>
> It's true that some people who use Gentoo go on and rave about how many
> nanoseconds they were able to shave off of their boot time, or how many
> obscure undocumented GCC options they managed to squeeze in without a
> compile error. I suppose the flexible nature of Gentoo is appealing to
> those who like to "look cool" and show off how they can watch the
> compiler do its thing. However, that's not at all what the distribution
> is about.
>
> Gentoo is about flexibility and choice. It's got a steepish learning
> curve, yes, but the documentation is very good; sadly, much of it was
> lost a few years ago, due to a bad mishap on the community Gentoo Wiki
> server, apparently without any backups. Back in the day, if I wanted to
> learn about Samba, I'd Google "howto linux samba" and Gentoo's Wiki
> would usually be among the first 3 hits. Their devs take stability very
> seriously; it's a rolling distro, but there is still a reasonable
> stabilization period for each package as new versions come out, during
> which any open bugs may hold up the package until they're fixed.
>
> It's all about choice. In my view, Gentoo is no better or worse than
> Debian, Red Hat, or Ubuntu. Different species, they all make for a
> better ecosystem.

Given the state of things, though, I'm more-and-more considering Linux 
from Scratch.  I find that I install enough from upstream source that 
packaging systems (and out-of-date packages) are less and less useful.  
Probably easier to set up Chef or Puppet and Jenkins to just keep the 
overall system current - and the heck with all this distro nonsense.

Cheers,

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra