philosophy of design; request for instruction

[Nick Wiltshire]

On Wednesday, June 10, 2020 7:40:51 AM MDT test wrote:
> On Tue, 2020-06-09 at 19:32 +0200, Ian Douglas wrote:
> > On Tuesday, 09 June 2020 15:38:18 SAST test wrote:
> > > It depends on what you consider "robust".  My experience is that
> > > Gentoos
> > > package management is a nightmare, giving you mysterious error messages
> > > with every update that are impossible to understand and finally leaves
> > > you
> > > unable to fix all the dependency problems it's running into because
> > > they
> > > are not fixable.  After a short while, you run into a dependency loop
> > > in
> > > that you need to update stuff which needs to be updated before you can
> > > update, and at point, you have to reinstall from scratch.
> > 
> > YMMV, but I've been running Gentoo on assorted boxes since 2005 and have
> > never
> > had to re-install. Portage usually tells you what the problem is if there
> > are
> > dependency issues, and the forums help when you get stuck.
> 
> Yes, YMMV, but:
> 
> Who understands these messages and can figure out how to fix the problems?
>  I had to ask on the mailing list all the time and could only hope that the
> messages would go away after a while after more updates.  Some didn't and
> new messages kept coming on every update.
> 

I understand them perfectly fine 99% of the time. When I don't the forums has 
an answer. Or just remove the blockers manually and plow on.

> I was told that yes, the messages suck and there is no interest in fixing
> them because it's difficult.  I was told I need to update at least once a
> week to run into less problems with updating.  Seriously?


Not true at all. I have updated systems that were left in the corner doing 
their thing for 2 years. With very little downtime I'll add.

> 
> Spending several hours on each update trying to fix the problems and
> running the risk that things simply don't work anymore is not feasible.
>  The idea of doing that once a week is ridiculous unless it's your full
> time job maybe and when you have only one machine to deal with.  It's not
> an option to reboot the severs like every other week because you were
> forced to update because otherwise they become impossible to update.  It's
> not even an option to reboot servers during working hours because it means
> that others can't work anymore, and spending the whole night trying to fix
> dependency problems isn't feasible, either, especially when things are not
> likely to work again in the morning.

There is literally no such thing as unable to update on Gentoo. Just because 
you can't figure it out doesn't mean it's not possible.

I had an admin rm -rf /usr and I was able to recover it without a reinstall. 
You can run emerge in a chroot with a fixed toolchain and install the packages 
on your live system. That's "robust".

> 
> In the end, updating became entirely impossible because of a dependency
> loop.  Gentoo means that you may be forced to reinstall all machines after
> your vacation is over because it has become impossible to update them.

Nope. Wrong. You simply didn't know how to fix it. I have had multiple Gentoo 
installs outlive the hardware they were installed on the day of purchase.

Other distros mean you get to reinstall every 3-5 years regardless of if 
things are going well or not. And you don't get to choose things like your 
init system, which OP indicated was an issue.

There's even a guide that will help you update from 15+ years back if you 
really wanted to....
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Upgrading_Gentoo#Upgrading_from_.28too.
29_old_systems

> 
> It was a nightmare I really don't need.  It is something that the OP could
> experience when he tries Gentoo.  Perhaps it helps him with making his
> decision.

To each their own. I will not bother replying to this thread again as it's not 
really the appropriate list, but felt the need to point out your absolutism of 
"it didn't work for me, so it must be broken" is simply inaccurate. I admin 
more than a dozen Gentoo boxes in production and only have to reboot 
occasionally for kernel upgrades.