[Tfug] Maintainable free UNIX

[Nicholas Esborn]

I have to agree with Scott.  FreeBSD is the most maintainable OS I have
worked with.  The ports tree has always been better than RPM-based Linux
distributions, IMO, and portupgrade fills in all the functionality that
Linux users might have been wishing for.

But I think it's much more than just packaging systems.  I think the BSDs
(all three) have a more quality-oriented mindset.  The "core team" system
is basically a council of elders who are responsible for keeping the
system internally consistent.  Debian also has this mindset, but I think
it suffers from the fragmentation of the GNU software base it draws from.

Back to the ports tree, I find that it works much more often than not.
Some statistics from freshports.org:

Port count 7413
Broken 95
Forbidden 64
new 24 hours 6
new 48 hours 18
new 7 days 37
new fortnight 60
new month 150

Less than 2% of the ports are broken or forbidden, which is typical.  Those
numbers go down a bit around a major release.

Linux has been, and will continue to be, the darling of open source.
Linux has plowed a huge channel into the public's consciousness and
commercial IT.  Those are its chief contributions.  Maintainability
and maturity are best found with the BSDs.

That aside, if Linux is the only option, then Debian is the only option.

-nick

On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 04:37:33PM -0500, Scott Corey wrote:
> Maintaining osef.org's research and development machine's has and is a 
> challenge, especially since I am now in Oklahoma (One of these days I will 
> come home). And both of them are FreeBSD-Stable. Not only is CVSup superior 
> to other systems updating ( Including Debian, Harry), but combining the Make 
> World process with PORTUPGRADE program, makes the task far simplier.
> 
> We do weekly rebuilds of the complete machine. It takes about 3 hours total 
> time. With only one reboot. So actual downtime is for the reboot only. Who 
> could ask for more, a completely new src and rebuild in three hours, and a 3 
> minute downtime, not bad!
> 
> On Wednesday 31 July 2002 09:04 am, Keith Davey wrote:
> > Well with Linux comming of age and other free unixes also continuing to
> > mature I was wonders about system mainatablility between all these
> > diffrent systems.  Day in and day out we here about this Linux install is
> > so easy and these system administration tools are so cool, but in the end
> > we are likly to install a system once and in theory maintain it thur
> > patches and upgrades for the life of the system.  My question in
> > particular is one of opinion.  What free unix system do you feel is the
> > most maintainable and why?  Conversely what free unix systems do you feel
> > are the hardest to maintain and why?
> > .
> > Personaly I find the the most maintanable system I have worked with to be
> > FreeBSD.  CVSup may not be unique to FreeBSD but it sure is nice when
> > coupled with the ability to rebuild the system from source on the fly.
> > Patching individual modules and rebuilding just those modules on the fly
> > is great as well.  My second selection would be Debian with apt-get.
> > Least mantainable it seems to me is RedHat.  First off I have never been a
> > fan of straite RPM.  Dependancy problems aside its just clunky to work
> > with.  RPM coupled with a upper level dependancy DB like in SUSE works ok,
> > but the SUSE tools to perform upgrades and patches is to slow (YAST2 sucks
> > the big one!).
> > .
> > Ok opinions welcome but please lets try not to make this into a pissing
> > contest (Bowie!)
> > .
> > Keith Davey
> > 
> > 
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> > 
> 
> Scott B. Corey, President, CTO, Co-Founder
> scorey@osef.org, Call Harry's (520) 661-7875 (CELL)
> Open Source Education Foundation, http://www.osef.org
> A non-profit tax exempt charitable organization
> 
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-- 
Nicholas Esborn
Unix Systems Administrator
Berkeley, California