Nothing can touch gentoo when it comes to keeping an up-to-date linux system. It has the tools (emerge, dispatch-conf, elogviewer, etc.) to tell you what has changed since yesterday, get the changes, and integrate them into your system. linux is a crazy-assed pile of mismanaged bits that are freshly broken in a dozen ways every single day. Anybody that runs a linux system will…
- spend a not-insignificant amount of time keeping their system running; and…
- tell you they don’t.
It’s part of the whole cocky “look what I can do” competitiveness built into every geek. Go ahead, now it’s time for you to lie to me and tell me otherwise. 😛
My current strategy for staying on the back of the bucking linux bronco…
- Run three machines: bleeding edge, desktop, server
- Update the bleeding edge every day, to “learn” (Note that I do NOT run unstable releases, but trust me, your configuration will get broken as software is “upgraded”…)
- Update the desktop, only with what you need, when you want the latest “tool” (dependencies should get updated as you go)
- Only run the essentials on the server, and update every 6 months (less means you’ll get too out of date, more means you’ll be broken too often)
On my bleeding edge machine, I update the entire system every night. Then I run a script to (re-)pop up dispatch-conf in a terminal, and elogviewer in an X window, so that when I look at the machine, I have an immediate summary of configuration changes and what I need to do to update.
UPDATE: I’m adding categories for each of my gentoo machines, to track cascading configuration changes. Check out my groovy icons!
