Forum OpenACS Q&A: Debian stable or testing? apt-get or yum? etc.

So far for my Debian systems, I've gotten away with just using Debian Stable plus selected adulterations of the "Ah, screw the package system from now, just install the source from the tarball like I'd do on Solaris" sort. But this is not acceptable nor desirable to me in the long run. E.g., trivially, even just running the latest OpenACS means the Debian Stable PostgreSQL package is much older than what I want.

Until Yum came out, I wouldn't even have even considered choosing an rpm based distribution over Debian. But the rpm based distributions seem to keep their "stable" packages more recent, which is attractive, so if Yum now gives me everything apt-get did...

Also, every time I've ever installed any Linux (or Windows, for that matter), I've always ended up making lots of manual configuration changes in to fix stuff the way I want, and I'm just plain tired of that.

I'm thinking about maintenance and turnover in a home network with at least a half dozen or so machines (file server and DNS proxy, MP3 machine in the living room, laptops, some other random server, misc. desktops scattered around, etc.). Manually fixing all the same things over and over again in almost-but-not-quite the same way for each individual machine - that is to say, traditional system administration - is something I've grown to despise. Fooling with just two or so Linux boxes at any one time has been enough to convince me of that.

Therefore, over and above just getting software installed onto machines in a relatively sane fashion, ideally, I also want some form of version-controlled, programmatic multi-host configuration control. Robert G. Brown touched on something sounding rather like that recently, for what I believe is his home network, complete with automatic installs via PXE ethernet booting. (His editorial moan here is also apropos.)

Which is better, yum or apt-get? And, perhaps much more importantly, what other tools need to be in the mix for a complete "install, configure, and control all my N arbitrary Linux boxes" solution? Biased towards simplicity please, where we may if necessary assume that N << 100, probably more like 5 to 10 or 20 max. (I neither expect nor particularly want to ever apply my new-won knowledge to maintaing bazillions of machines at some huge company.)

I think Yum might not handle source packages yet (bad...), but other than that does it have any down-sides compared to apt-get? What I've read about it so far (granted, all written by Yum authors or users) suggest that Yum is cleaner and simpler than apt-get.

Which is better, Debian or one of the zillion rpm based distributions? And I don't mean religiously, I mean in terms of which will make my life easier in scenarios like the above - vague as that may be.

All good advice, war stories, thoughts, comments, etc. appreciated. ;)

I don't want interactive configurability, I think it's evil. Yes, I see why package install-time configurability is very desirable and useful, so rpm not having anything like that is very bad. But it should not be interactive (except optionally), it should be scriptable. I should be able to make an API call saying, "what are the configuration questions I need to answer?", then save the answers in a script and automate everything.

Regarding Debian being "so much more than the packaging system", yes, I'm at least peripherally aware of that. Comments I've read elsewhere suggest that the real value-added in packaging software (rpm or deb) is all the hard work that goes into (or should go into) keeping a very large set of packages organized, consistent, rational, and sane - avoiding dependency loops, etc. And here Debian would seem to still be substantially ahead of any other distribution, likely because they've had the pre-requisite enabling tools like apt-get for a much longer time, and thus recognized and started working on the hard stuff much earlier.

I plan to mostly have fattish clients, not thin. (Exceptions might be certain special purposes, like if I ever had a small-ish diskless Beowulf cluster.) Which is to say, each client has its own disk and own installed software, but any data that needs to be backed up should be on the central file server.

Probably I'll end up with separate home directories on each machine even though (dependings on how installs and configuration updates are handled) that might be in some conflict with the above. So far I don't really know much about LDAP, NIS, etc., and I do want many (though not necessarily all) machines in my home network to still be able to function just fine even if the file server is down. If it's feasible to combine the best of both worlds - all user logins and home directories centrally controlled and consistent, but still retain the ability to temporarily (ideally, even permanently) revert to operating "detached" from the central server - if that's feasible I'd appreciate pointers to how to do it.

deb http://www.backports.org/debian/ woody smartmontools

On the other hand, if the same package does exist already in Stable, as is the case with Mozzilla, then nothing I do with apt-get and friends will install or upgrade the package!

deb http://www.backports.org/debian woody mozilla

Since I've just spent most of two days trying to use debian to upgrade kde from 3.1 to 3.2, my advice today is to not use a computer.

Between stable and unstable, which one do most of you suggest, keeping in mind that I would eventually try and install OACS, and that I'm looking for the easiest choice, not the most performant one?

Network cards not working is a common problem. That usually goes away when you install a newer kernel, which is usually the first thing I do. Of course, that's annoying, because if you're not connected to the network...

There are a lot of alternative ways of installing debian, though, so sometimes people who think Debian is hard to install just haven't tried one of the easy ways..

I think I will follow the documentation step by step, and try installing OpenACS. There are many black holes, though; the fist one is: Debian documentation strongly suggests to install software with that apt-get command, while OpenACS manual often says something different (es. "Debian users, especially Debian stable users, should install PostGreSQL from source as detailed below...").
I am a bit puzzled.

I run Debian unstable on three different machines (one of them is a server) and only had one breakage in a desktop machine in the last year. The breakage was with GNOME, and was easy to solve.

In the one server I moved to unstable, we were running Woody + backports, but it became too painful. For a while we had a chroot with unstable, just so we could have some sid packages. So we (the group handling the machine) just bit the bullet and went to "careful unstable", meaning we watch the mailing lists and are careful before doing an upgrade.

-Roberto

I we were to run a Debian unstable desktop, immediately after each "apt-get upgrade" I would want to tag all current packages so that if anything later broke I would have some automatic record of what package versions I was running when, to help me figure out what went wrong. Is there some easy way to do that?