[Zope] Better unix distrib for zope ??

Serge Wroclawski serge@tux.org
Wed, 3 Oct 2001 09:39:59 -0400 (EDT)


On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Juli=E1n Mu=F1oz Dom=EDnguez wrote:

>
> I am very_very_very bored with the "politics" beside the rpm based
> distribuition (redhat, mandrake), which made impossible to to not be
> updating anything at any minute of the day (distributions that creates =
any
> kind of dependencies based on librairies, on anything).

I think that you're probably seeing two problems intersecing, but not
seeing the root cause.

Constant updating on a server should only be done when there is a need fo=
r
an upgrade based on required features or security.

Upgrades ever few weeks based on security is pretty normal. And doing
those upgrades (if they apply to your system) is the job of a system
administrator. It's boring, but it's part of the job.

Failure to do that will mean that your system will be vulnerable.

As to the complexity of upgrades. I'd say that the RPM based distrubtions
don't do major upgrades well (ie 6-7), and that minor number upgrades
aren't much better (6.1-6.2), but for thier normal security patches, it's
often quite simple and conflict and dependency issues won't present
themselves there.

> I want to have a really stable server on the net (for running zope), wh=
ere
> I can upgrade without having to upgrade anything. I would like to have
> your opinion about (all oriented to Zope):
>
> Debian
> Suse
> FreeBSD

This isn't really your problem so it won't make the solution any easier.
At home I use Debian, at work, Red Hat. Yes, upgrades and whatnot are
easier on Debian, but everything has its tradeoffs (ie Debian's Python an=
d
Zope packages are ancient).

If you want the newest and you don't want packages, nothing is stopping
you from building it all yourself in /usr/local/ or for that matter,
rolling your own distro. But the caviot is that doing something like that
is a lot of work to maintain.

- Serge Wroclawski