[luau] Gentoo emerge vs Debian apt-get

[Vince Hoang]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 03:15:39PM -1000, Dustin Cross wrote:
> Who has used both and which do people prefer for keeping a
> server up-to- date for security patches and such. I have never
> used either of these distros, but I am thinking of using one
> for the upgrade of my server from SuSE 7.3. I want something
> easy to keep up-to-date. The server is a web, SquirrelMail, and
> Samba server.

Here are my experiences on Debian vs. Gentoo on x86:

Gentoo is evovling very quickly. It makes a great test box. This
is a fun distribution to try if you want to keep up with all the
changes. It does not make a great production system because the
architecture seems very fluid and has yet to gel.

Debian is very meticulous about releasing under stable. If you
have only a few services and only want to deal with critical
updates, then stick with stable. Otherwise, immediately upgrade
your installation to testing. The testing branch is just as
stable as official releases from other distributions. WRT
updating, I now use apt-get via cron but dselect from the CLI.

Both distributions are responsible about security updates. Gentoo
releases updates at lightning speed. One aspect of Debian updates
to take into consideration is that efforts are made to backport
fixes rather than upgrade the package to the "secure" release.

-Vince