Good. Debian is great and Rhel sucks
CERN Transitioning Computers To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution
21–25 of 25 posts
Re: CERN Transitioning Computers To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution
#22They could have used gentoo with their own binary package server. Maximum flexibility, including all compiler flags.
I'm a Gentoo dev and work at CERN since a while. Of course I jokingly suggested that to my colleagues. I think it could actually work pretty well, though. Many physicists use Gentoo. We run most things on Alma Linux, but there's also RedHat in the mix. A good intersection of CERN and Gentoo is EESSI. They use CVMFS, which is a FUSE filesystem used for software distribution from CERN, and Gentoo as part of their softw…
Not a Gentoo dev, but also at CERN. I've been using (headless, I'm not going down the GUI toolkit building rabbit-hole again) Gentoo for the last 15 years of development (both at home and at work). Great OS :)
Re: CERN Transitioning Computers To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution
#23They could have used gentoo with their own binary package server. Maximum flexibility, including all compiler flags.
I'm a Gentoo dev and work at CERN since a while. Of course I jokingly suggested that to my colleagues. I think it could actually work pretty well, though. Many physicists use Gentoo. We run most things on Alma Linux, but there's also RedHat in the mix. A good intersection of CERN and Gentoo is EESSI. They use CVMFS, which is a FUSE filesystem used for software distribution from CERN, and Gentoo as part of their softw…
Yeah, I'm really not sure that's a joke; binary packages, optionally combined with a prefix install, seem like a great fit.
Re: CERN Transitioning Computers To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution
#24They could have used gentoo with their own binary package server. Maximum flexibility, including all compiler flags.
Honest question, what would be different from doing the same with Debian packages? Building packages from source is trivial in Debian. It is literally one command, not much different from installing binary packages. Hosting internal repositories is completely expected and well tested.
Personally I have used Gentoo for many years, though never professionally. Its secure extensions were very well tested and documented back in the day, before SELinux pretty much took over. The kernel build system was terrific.
But never once did I consider setting compiler flags an important feature. The person who knows what flags are best used with an individual package, that -Os is more important than -O3 for this particular loop, is either the packager (who knows the system architecture) or the original developer (who wrote the code). Never the end user.
Debian is comparably a more mature system. The downside is perhaps that its packages are a bit more complex than they should be. Functionality-wise it can do anything you could wish for. But if you are a big institution with a lot of competent people in house, go right ahead. You can't possibly go wrong with a well tested system and the knowledge to improve the bits you need.
Re: CERN Transitioning Computers To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution
#25They could have used gentoo with their own binary package server. Maximum flexibility, including all compiler flags.
Honest question, what would be different from doing the same with Debian packages? Building packages from source is trivial in Debian. It is literally one command, not much different from installing binary packages. Hosting internal repositories is completely expected and well tested. Personally I have used Gentoo for many years, though never professionally. Its secure extensions were very well tested and documented…
They are the ones that reported having problems with compiler flags. What use is binary distribution OS if it needs rebuilding everything?