On Monday 10 Mar 2014 10:08:06 yaro@xxxxxxxxxx wrote: > I love Arch, but not for servers. I prefer Debian on my server. Despite all > the dire warnings given to keep an eye on Arch's web site about certain > upgrades, its still all too frequent user intervention is necessary where > nothing is stated on the website at all about potential problems of that > particular upgrade. Oh yeah, you need to have your head screwed on for each update. That is certainly a bad thing if you just want a simple Samba or PHP web server, for instance. > Production environments do not need that sort of support. While latest and > greatest and the newest features might sound great for the desktop, on > servers it's not that critical, and long term support and a need for a > release to "stand still" is much more important. It depends on the usecase. For me, I rely on the ease with which I can modify and rebuild packages on Arch. There's a relatively complex interaction on this server, and I like to know that I'm in control. For instance, the Ruby rmagick gem doesn't like the imagemagick package that Arch ships, so I have to do a small tweak to the PKGBUILD and build it myself. I don't get that kind of flexibility with Debian. (I'm sure it's technically possible, but Debian isn't geared toward that workflow like Arch is.) > This is why I prefer Debian on my server: The only updates I should want on > a server are those that improve the integrity and stability of its > environment. I'll happily wait 2-3 years before I go for the major upgrades > that will change the environment. Even then I might wait for "oldstable" to > hit its EOL before upgrading, because not getting support at all is even > worse. > > At that point I can be confident that most of the upgrades won't need my > intervention to work, save for a few things, thanks to testing. For a straight-forward server that I want to set up and forget, I totally agree. For a server that I use for continuous development of internal tools, I think I'd find Debian too brittle. > Arch is great for power desktop users and those who want to be assured that > they don't have to wait for months to years to get the latest Firefox or > KDE/GNOME versions. But I've used it on servers juuuust enough to know it's > not really suitable for that role. I'd be using 3-year-old versions of Nginx, Redis, and Ruby if my server were Debian. As a developer, that's a real drag. It's just a different set of requirements, I think. Paul
