On Apr 16, 2004, at 13:02, Ivan Krstic wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
Is there any compelling reason to use a non-rpm distribution, either? What does the package format have to do with anything?
You're right; it doesn't. However, APT (the Debian packet manager) is addictive - in practice, it reduces administration overhead more than most admins can imagine.
Well, APT is available in Fedora too as well as YUM, which seems to be the default. (APT and YUM are a level of abstraction above Red Hat's RPM and Debian's DPKG, which will just complain at you if you haven't fetched all dependencies.) apt-get *is* great, though. I use it on my Mac -- also not running Debian -- to install packages from Fink.
Debian is not mature on AMD64. But as I mentioned - we're trying to squeeze out every last bit of performance on this box anyway. Gentoo, even if the bootstrapping takes a while, is designed precisely for our situation, and AFAIK is stable on amd64.
Performance is nice, but the machine needs to *work* too. Geoffrin was a speedy devil, but she crashed all the time, hence the long hassles with repairs ending in (hopefully) a refund from Penguin. We can only hope than Geoffrin II will be easier to get along with...
I've got a Gentoo box at home (32-bit Athlon). It seems to work well enough, but feels more bleeding edge. I'm not convinced of magical performance improvements, either; it's going to be running basically one major service, MySQL, from either an optimized official MySQL binary or an optimized local build regardless of which distro is used.
Anyone used Gentoo/AMD64 (or Gentoo generally) in a production environment?
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)