Re: Linux distros for servers that matter

On 3 Feb 2005, at 15:55, Andy Smith wrote:
> In my view this is so conservative that it goes out the other side
> and becomes a real problem.  With a 2.2 kernel I would find it
> extremely painful to get software raid and LVM working properly, for
> example.

Hm. There are 2.4 kernels in stable, and you are free to compile your 
own with the help of the Debian tools (which build a nice deb out of 
your kernel sources).
There might be entering new kernel revisions on stable updates. 2.4.18 
is in stable (3.0r4) and 2.4.19 for ia64. So there are updates. Serious 
kernel security fixes get backported.

> So Testing does get proper security updates within a few days of
> Stable?

If there are no other problems with a package (a package unstable 
containing serious bugs would not be eligible) it gets pushed to 
testing within 2-3 days when the urgency is set to high (which is the 
case on security updates). *But* (and this is a serious one) it needs 
to be built on every architecture first. The time I mentioned is the 
one enforced by the scripts, but the buildds need to be catching up. In 
reality it should not take more than a week, IIRC packages with 
urgency=high get also higher priorities in the build farms.

> [...] with the package management of freebsd or Gentoo. :)

Those systems are nice because you do not need to wait for a package to 
build. Often you could just copy/modify the old build hint to get a new 
version. However... about compile flags... you're right when you are 
talking about feature set. That's why there are *-heavy packages in 
Debian which provide all the functionality. But some programs really 
lack things, that's right. But if you talk about optimisations... The 
hype about Gentoo was not -- as you know -- really meaningful. The 
speed gains are *very* low.

Regards,
Philipp Kern

_______________________________________________
public mailing list
public-Hb7ITwsGSD4lroQnaJEqWdi2O/[email protected]
http://lists.blitzed.org/listinfo/public