3 ms·

I see no discussion of package management in here, which is kind of a bummer. My experience with yum has been pretty crummy and I don't think it's improved over

I see no discussion of package management in here, which is kind of a bummer. My experience with yum has been pretty crummy and I don't think it's improved over the last several years. That alone should drive someone developing software away from working on that platform. Centos & Red Hat are great if you have a single package you need to deploy to a machine and all the dependencies are already there or easy to pull down from yum. You get the advantage of not having a capricious OOMKiller process that can randomly take down your system. But if you're actually in the process of building something, working on Centos is just a pain in the ass.

SwellJoe 13y ago
Just a counter point: I love yum. It is, by far, my favorite package management option. Managing yum repos is a breeze vs every other option (the toolchain is one command, vs a half dozen commands and hours of manual labor to setup a new repo for Debian/Ubuntu). I also prefer it from the end user perspective. apt-get is fine, and I wouldn't be at all unhappy with servers running Debian, but yum is my preference.
- mercurial 13y ago
  As a Debian user, I agree that you can't beat the ease of setting up a repo on RHEL/CentOS. On the other hand, I'm not fond of the .spec format and working with yum is not particularly pleasant. Not to mention that Debian ships with a lot more packages.
  - shredfvz 13y ago
    I've provisioned and maintained dozens of servers all running Arch, and currently have four home PCs running it. I've found Pacman to be one of the easier and more pleasant package managers to live with. You can sort through tens of thousands of existing PKGBUILDs on the AUR [1], which typically makes it quick and easy to start packaging software for Arch. You can even sync a flat text file database of all official Arch packages with abs [2]. The ability to reverse engineer every PKGBUILD for a wide variety of software is a major plus in my book. Writing a PKGBUILD takes roughly the same effort as compiling software from source with a bash script. PKGBUILDs are simple to write, and there's just enough "magic" in Pacman to keep things sane. Nine times out of ten, the PKGBUILD writing process boils down to copy/pasting directions from README or INSTALL files. It's like a bash script, except more 'done-for-you'. Finding exact dependencies is typically a cinch with the AUR and tools like packer. Maintaining a rolling distro can be a labor of love, but if you love the system, you'll find it may significantly increase your overall sanity. It's another way of doing things, but I consider choice of distro to be one of the more important decisions to make, and IME, Arch has been such a significant departure from other distros that not trying it in a serious capacity is roughly equivalent to not trying Vim / Emacs ever in your career. Which is to say, I think it's a mistake not to at least see what it may offer you, especially if you're in any doubt. I hope my positivity is only seen as that: positivity, and not overzealous dedication to one specific toolset. Arch probably isn't a panacea, nor will I claim that it's a perfect fit for your way of doing things. But I have never found something as pleasant as Pacman to work with. In addition, I never would've even tried Arch if I hadn't been slightly flustered by the seemingly irrational exuberance random sysadmins displayed for the system. 1: https://aur.archlinux.org https://aur.archlinux.org 2: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Abs https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Abs
IlPeach 13y ago
possibly one of the worst package managers around are shipped on centos and rh. I do consider them the sysop's nightmare.
duskwuff 13y ago
> You get the advantage of not having a capricious OOMKiller process that can randomly take down your system... Er, what? The OOM killer is part of the kernel. It's not a process, and it's not distribution-dependent.

SwellJoe 13y ago

Just a counter point: I love yum. It is, by far, my favorite package management option. Managing yum repos is a breeze vs every other option (the toolchain is one command, vs a half dozen commands and hours of manual labor to setup a new repo for Debian/Ubuntu). I also prefer it from the end user perspective. apt-get is fine, and I wouldn't be at all unhappy with servers running Debian, but yum is my preference.

mercurial 13y ago
As a Debian user, I agree that you can't beat the ease of setting up a repo on RHEL/CentOS. On the other hand, I'm not fond of the .spec format and working with yum is not particularly pleasant. Not to mention that Debian ships with a lot more packages.
- shredfvz 13y ago
  I've provisioned and maintained dozens of servers all running Arch, and currently have four home PCs running it. I've found Pacman to be one of the easier and more pleasant package managers to live with. You can sort through tens of thousands of existing PKGBUILDs on the AUR [1], which typically makes it quick and easy to start packaging software for Arch. You can even sync a flat text file database of all official Arch packages with abs [2]. The ability to reverse engineer every PKGBUILD for a wide variety of software is a major plus in my book. Writing a PKGBUILD takes roughly the same effort as compiling software from source with a bash script. PKGBUILDs are simple to write, and there's just enough "magic" in Pacman to keep things sane. Nine times out of ten, the PKGBUILD writing process boils down to copy/pasting directions from README or INSTALL files. It's like a bash script, except more 'done-for-you'. Finding exact dependencies is typically a cinch with the AUR and tools like packer. Maintaining a rolling distro can be a labor of love, but if you love the system, you'll find it may significantly increase your overall sanity. It's another way of doing things, but I consider choice of distro to be one of the more important decisions to make, and IME, Arch has been such a significant departure from other distros that not trying it in a serious capacity is roughly equivalent to not trying Vim / Emacs ever in your career. Which is to say, I think it's a mistake not to at least see what it may offer you, especially if you're in any doubt. I hope my positivity is only seen as that: positivity, and not overzealous dedication to one specific toolset. Arch probably isn't a panacea, nor will I claim that it's a perfect fit for your way of doing things. But I have never found something as pleasant as Pacman to work with. In addition, I never would've even tried Arch if I hadn't been slightly flustered by the seemingly irrational exuberance random sysadmins displayed for the system. 1: https://aur.archlinux.org https://aur.archlinux.org 2: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Abs https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Abs

IlPeach 13y ago

possibly one of the worst package managers around are shipped on centos and rh. I do consider them the sysop's nightmare.

duskwuff 13y ago

> You get the advantage of not having a capricious OOMKiller process that can randomly take down your system... Er, what? The OOM killer is part of the kernel. It's not a process, and it's not distribution-dependent.