Pieter Van den Abeele of Gentoo writes in his blog: “The Gentoo team has done an amazing job creating the most customizable meta-distribution on todays market. […] One of our projects codenamed Portaris, has been maintaining Gentoo Portage on top of Solaris9 and Solaris10 builds. […] I am pleased to announce that Gentoo is considering integrating OpenSolaris support into the machine readable knowledge base we call Portage.”
Portage for Solaris
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Eugenia Loli
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I’ve never used Gentoo Linux before and am not familiar with Portage. From a practical point of view, how would Gentoo Solaris differ from using Sun’s install of Solaris plus Sunfreeware.com and blastwave.org?
Portage is just a package management system. It manages installation of different software (dependancy resolution included).
Portage gives an administrator the power to stay current with
opensource project.
Portage is amazing.
Have a look in the gentoo documentation:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=2&chap=…
Next step is Gentoo OpenSolaris distro.
Many people do not like the idea behind portage. The compilation from source doesnt fit well with everybody. I never have used Solaris. Many claim that Solaris 10 will be the best out there. Portage tree it is very extensive. Some people like Debian repository, but portage is no joke. The integration of both could work. But again you will see people complaining about compiling source in a production server.
What’s wrong with compiling from source for a production server? I mean, at least you know that the stuff is compiled to work for your hardware! I think that actually makes more sense than running some binary that was cross-compiled on a Palm!
But just a coupled of queries; which compiler are they going to support? are will they support the SUN CC too?
Also, regarding the “compile from source”, how is it any different than getting it from off Blastwave.org? personally, the compile from source is MUCH more efficient from the point of view that you don’t end up having to have one big server holding 4gigs of files, instead you have a CVS tree for portage, and the sources can be downloaded from any number of locations.
The current situation with Blastwave.org is the fact that it lacks the money to cover the costs; Portage on the other hand would provide a much lower cost way of delivering up-to-date packages for Solaris users, both workstation and server – then again, anyone doing any serious server work would be using SUNs software stack.
Just tell your users that it’ll only take about 8 hours to recompile their system if a new KDE comes out. They’ll be very, very happy.
The Gentoo guys need to make packages first-class citizens. I mean, portage comes directly from *BSD ports, so why is package support so lacking?
What do you mean? It doesn’t seem to be lacking to me at all. Unless you mean binary packages as opposed to ebuilds?
Wow, this is interesting news to me! I didn’t know that they push out new software installs as they come out? I thought new software was installed during non-working time like during the weekend or in the evening.
So then who gives a flying fart that it takes 8 hours to compile a new version of KDE if it happens overnight anyway!
Hmmm, interesting thought.
portage has a lack of binary packages because of USE flags.
I mean, at least you know that the stuff is compiled to work for your hardware! I think that actually makes more sense than running some binary that was cross-compiled on a Palm!
A quote worthy of funroll-loops…
You don’t understand how compilers work, don’t you?
I know you’re just a worthless troll but on the off chance that you’re serious I’m just wondering if the thought of compiling one binary from source to be deployed across an enterprise had ever crossed your mind
Linux’s reputation is to be very flexibel. Once companies like Redhat, SuSE, Linspire, etc. precomplile it, they had to make choises along the way. By making those decisions, they make it much easier to install and use for the average user base. BUT, they are also stealing most of Linux flexibility.
For instance, install PHP using a rpm on Redhat or SuSE. They decided to compile PHP with QT support, and QT depends on X11. So, if you want to install PHP, you will also have to install a complete graphical workstation. This is utterly useless for a server.
Of course we can rebuild PHP by using the SRPMS, and it works. But we are talking ‘out of the box’ here. Besides, most of you were opposed to compiling stuff on your own.
Gentoo doesn’t take any decision away, and that makes it the most flexibel, and easiest to use Linux (meta)distro there is. Of course there is also LFS, but that’s merely a handbook on how to do everything yourself. Naturally the is no package manager for LFS at all.
And thinking of “Gentoo OpenSolaris”, makes OpenSolaris much more interesting to me. I’m looking really forward to this, and hope we will have Portage on OpenSolaris shortly after its release.
One thing I might add, Gentoo/Portage can also install binary packages, it doesn’t force you to compile everthing.
What you’re missing about these “package management systems” is how dangerous they are to use on a production server. I would be very suspect of any administrator working in a Sun Server environment who used such package systems to maintain their patches or software.
When you’re running a billion dollar application on a half-million dollar server, you want to make sure you know what -every single patch- and OS rev on your system is. You want to make 100% sure that everything is compatible and isn’t just “the latest and greatest” for the sake of being on the bleeding edge. Nobody in their right mind would do such a thing.
Seasoned, professionial administrators will spend months researching patches and dependencies and their potential impact. Anyone who doesn’t want to lose data or have server outages will do regression testing and staging testing prior to doing a live rollout.
Sun servers and Solaris are not necessarily designed to be the latest, the greatest, or the fastest. They’re made to be bulletproof. They’re made to be rock solid stable so that your company can keep running, you can stay in business, and you can make money. You don’t always need a fast car to get where you want to go, sometimes you need a tank.
These patch management systems might be find for the home user, the small webserver farm, or any other non-mission critical application, but they simply aren’t a good idea for The Enterprise.
Using Portage on a Solaris box is a great idea, the reason I stopped using Solaris on my desktop was going to sunfreeware for all my packages irratated me (I know their are other ways now).
Portage is happily adaptable to Binary installs too so if Sun just used Portage to be a package management tool then provided their own binaries it could be a real hit for them.
Though I doubt Solaris would be as device friendly as the Linux kernel would be so I won’t get too excited (unless I buy a sun server). Oh, and proper servers don’t run KDE btw!
Solaris already has an open source package management tool: Pkg-get from http://www.blastwave.org.
Sure portage can resolve deps and specific versions of packages but also handles the complex issues of allowing rules be defined for how to ./configure, make, make install a package. The ebuild system is something that desurves a tip-o-the-hat.
I’m just curious but how is this different from pkgsrc on Solaris? I heard that Portage is something that was motivated by FreeBSD’s ports, which is also the very motive for pkgsrc. If what I understand is right, Pkgsrc and Portage are both OS-independent compling-from-source package system, right? Or do I have wrong idea on Gentoo Portage? (I’m sorry if my question is so arrogant. I’ve never used Gentoo before.)
You have a point but you can still check the packages before hand if you do so desire. Portage allows you to retrieve the packages & dependencies without having to install them (emerge –fetchonly <package>). You could then then manually check the packages and patches and if your happy you can then emerge them. What’s handy about portage is the fact that dependecies are retrieved for you and the applications compiled to your liking and system architecture. Thats got to be a good thing right?
Flags are necessary in gentoo. Without them, the system wouldnt be as stable as it is. I have a couple of months using gentoo. Couple of complains, nothing that some reading couldnt fix. I am compiling a new system now to be use as my HTPC. Gentoo and Mythtv. I read one comment about having a expensive server and you must be sure they will work (patches). Well, that is why you should have test environments also. I mean that is how IT departments work (decent ones). How in the name of the Mars rovers you are going to know if the patch will work 100%? Not even the programmer knows that.
You don’t understand how compilers work, don’t you?
I agree about the funroll-loops comment, but for the record, there is nothing intrinsic to compiler technology that prevents you from cross-compiling x86 apps on a Palm
@insomnia you dont have a clue what portage is, so instead making stupid posts u could at least inform yourself about it. You dont have to run everything latest or compile everything from source. Portage gives u the choice. It is so flexible that u can use it on almost any unix. The problem is that there are not much binary packages. Because if u support many architectures u have to host binary for each but with portage u dont have to. U can have a package in binary or source or both or only binary /source. It is ur choice what to use.
These comments about using on a production server are correct and funny at the same time. The correct part is that this type of system would _never_ be used on a production system.
The funny part however, is that most production environments also have systems designed for testing purposes. Every package is (hopefully) built and tested on these systems and then pushed into production.
NetBSD’s pkgsrc, FreeBSD ports, Gentoo’s Portage, OpenPKG, all these systems can make a SysAdmins job much easier when it comes to maintanance. Congrats!
goodness, most of the world isn’t running a billion dollar application on a half-million dollar server. and i’m not degrading portage in any way. granted i’m only running a few servers ranging in activity but i’d certainly call our ecommerce server mission critical and it happily runs gentoo. i’ve kept it up-to-date on a weekly basis and in 5 months time never had a problem or a single reboot. now, if i were more motivated, i’d dedicate a single offline machine to build the packages, test, and move upstream to the production server, but i haven’t felt the need … yet
i think you’re dreaming about how does it work in the real world 😉
1/ solaris is far to be bulletprof and rock solid, evrything else is marketing (at least for Slowlaris 7,8,9 on E10000 🙁 )
2/ usually you patch when you think about it, if possible at least one month after the release, and if you really serious, on a dedicated test server 😉
3/we’re using lost of gnu (tools from sun sucks) why not a gentoo.
from my professional experience, Linux already catch up solaris in security and stability, and perhaps in scalability as well !!! (on sun hardware)
I like gentoo alot. Also, I like the process of compiling from source. Portage solves the dependency problem (good scheme adopted from BSD ports). But it requires some good crunching power. Any here with experience with gentoo in a 64 platform ?
I heard some comments about a graphical install for Gentoo? I like stage 1, but you must have couple of days free. (Athlon 2200/512 = 20 something hours for a basic desktop). I guess the GI will help a bit.
Does anyone know of a distribution based on gentoo that uses portage?
Any good one around?
Portage supports binaries also!
Do instead “emerge pckg” just “emerge pckg-bin”
Many popular big apps as firefox-bin or openoffice-bin exist alsready so dont blame Portage to be “compiling shit only”…
my 2c
…provided it integrates with the Solaris packaging system
pkgsrc has supported Solaris (and many other unices) for years. Solaris was the first OS (besides NetBSD of course) to be supported by pkgsrc. The original project was called Zoularis and was the work of Christos Zoulas of NetBSD and tcsh fame.
i am sure you are looking for Vidalinux. It is not a very old one, but i think it is the only decent one that is based on gentoo.
A few of the biggest apps are supported as binaries, but kde for example isn’t. The fact that the packages manager supports installing from binaries is no use for home users because there is no package repository. Something like linuxpackages.net for gentoo, where you could submit versions of packages with every combination of use flags, would make it the best distribution out there.
Myself, I use portage on slackware so I can use linuxpackages.net packages when I can’t be bothered to compile.
but i’d certainly call our ecommerce server mission critical and it happily runs gentoo. i’ve kept it up-to-date on a weekly basis and in 5 months time never had a problem or a single reboot
I sense a little fibbing here…
Surely updating the system that often would require a kernel or library update in that time frame that would require a reboot.
—
And a good off-topic question would be what in god’s name are you doing such frequent portage updates on a ‘mission critical’ server for in the first place? Important security updates and such are NOT that frequent for you to be doing bleeding edge type updates on a production server. I laugh at the poor company whose server you are responsable for. You may have and continue to be getting away with such an obscenely risky admin mentality, but eventually it will bite you hard when one of those updates flakes. OR the electricity goes out on the server and upon reboot all those so called updates you have applied over 5 months all go into effect finally and at once.
This is what happens when companies start looking to cut costs and figure we can get a linux guru in to do the work. You get Gentoo linux on your server being managed by someone who’s experince in IT consists of bleeding edge desktop installs, updating weekly and ontop of it all even admiting his own laziness by not taking any cautions.
Sheesh
> […] the most customizable meta-distribution on todays market. […] machine readable knowledge base we call Portage.
Well, T2
http://www.t2-project.org
is at least on par with Gentoo, if not designed with better customization in mind.
The packaging format got also layouted to be machine parseable using a simple ASCII tag format, e.g.
http://svn.exactcode.de/t2/trunk/package/base/gcc/gcc.desc
, instead of simple variable assignment, limitted to a specific programming language.
I agree about the funroll-loops comment, but for the record, there is nothing intrinsic to compiler technology that prevents you from cross-compiling x86 apps on a Palm
I know, that’s exactly my point. It doesn’t matter as long as the compiler supports the platform.
How easy can Portaris be installed as nonroot? At work we have a standard Solaris 8/CDE install. I hate CDE with a passion, but since I am not root admin, I can’t change it. There seems to be no obvious way to compile pkgsrc as nonroot. After some time and tweaking of the source to comment out features that caused difficulty, I was able to compile GTK2 and XFCE4 to my home directory. It’s a pretty decent environment. Unfortunately, Solaris 8 has some difficulty with shared libraries so compiling things like Docbook and Subversion don’t seem possible. Let’s not even mention OpenOffice (which doesn’t install because our Solaris install lacks some patches).
I don’t have an enormous amount of time to set up my system at work. I’ve had to sacrifice many lunch hours to get my current system to the point it is and I haven’t changed it in a year since it was so time intensive to do so. I’d love it if something like Portaris could eventually be ported to Solaris 8 as a nonroot home directory install.
Anyone look at the date of the posts in the forum? Its from 2003. ;-p
Gentoo has been my sole operating system for well over a year now and I had to laugh at the comments regarding the “choice” provided for binary packages.
$ esearch “-bin$” | grep * | wc -l
85
Wait a second… 85 whole packages! Wow! Most of these are Java-based as well by the way. Now let us compare that with the total number of packages in the portage tree:
$ esearch * | grep * | wc -l
8783
So that means that less than one percent of the total portage tree leaves you with a choice. On top of this though, one must remember that many of these packages do not provide a source alternative, therefore one finds oneself in a state of preference-lacking deja vu.
Also, please refrain from attempts to discredit my reasoning by pointing out the -k and -K arguments for emerge. This would be all fine and dandy if a decent repository of binary packages was in existence, although USE flags would be utterly pointless.
It seems that the comment form likes to unescape escaped asterisks.
I’m not a Gentoo user, but it seems to me that the problem is that not many binary packages are provided, although Portage perfectly supports it. So you could perfectly build packages on a testing machine, and install those binary packages on your production machine(s). It’s kind of creating your own package repository.
But as a *BSD user, I’m perfectly happy with pkgsrc/Ports, they can do this as well.
There appears to be no reduction in usage at Blastwave.
We will continue to offer KDE and GNOME and 960+ other software packages to users. The philosophy of how things are done at Blastwave will not change and Sun is onboard with Blastwave to ensure that Blastwave has the resources required to deliver top quality packages.
The packages at Blastwave will always be in standard package format and any end user can get a list of what they have with a simple ‘pkginfo’ command. As you may expect the GNOME package is installed simply with ‘pkg-get -i gnome’ and that results in a large number of pre-built and tested dependencies being installed. In order. Correctly.
You may not be aware that a number of the people in the Blastwave project are Sun software engineers. We work closely together to ensure that the production release known as Solaris will have a wide array of software options to the end user.
I am involved in the OpenSolaris project and have been from before day one. The people from Gentoo are also involved and there is a great opportunity to enrich the end users experience with Portage. I have been in continual contact with the Gentoo people and we are working together to ensure that the Solaris user has everything that they will need or want.
Really it is all about choice.
I think that the options and choices for the Solaris end user have expanded wildly in the last three years. The Solaris x86 implementation is fully supported in every way and we see no shortage of growth in the future.
This is all a very good thing and I am very happy to see that people now argue over ‘options’ and no longer over ‘Solaris is dead’ and other foolishness.
It is my prediction that there will be arguments two years from now over what platform people should run their 64-bit OpenSolaris distro on. Or what hardware OpenGL option they should use. Or can they run it on an old 486 because they choose to do such a thing. Any number of future arguments are possible.
Probably because the future for Solaris is wide OPEN.
Dennis Clarke
[email protected]
http://www.blastwave.org/
ps: Feel free to read http://www.blastwave.org/maintainers/dclarke
handles the complex issues of allowing rules be defined for how to ./configure, make, make install a package.
What’s so complex about typing ‘./configure –help’ and reading the available options?
The ebuild system is something that desurves a tip-o-the-hat
Not really. Gentoo is responsible for a large contigent in our community who know nothing about compilers, optimization, bottlenecks, and dead codepaths but feel it necessary to discuss them at length with what they believe to be some authority.
I just finished setting up Gentoo for AMD64 on my A64 3500 shuttle rig. All I can say is its fantastic! It is, in a word, ridiculously fast. Many of the apps are open the instant my finger lifts from clicking to open.
At this point I have a fully functional desktop system running the lastest from ~amd64: gentoo-dev-sources (kernel-2.6.10), xorg, Gnome 2.8, Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, Azureus, gFtp, mplayer(with all win32 codecs), mplayerplug-in for firefox, java, flash), xmms, and several others.
I only ran into a couple minor glitches building the system from Stage 1, and all were minor and easily fixed with a quick stop into the Gentoo forums.
Only part that gave me trouble was getting my external Firewire HD working. That was merely a matter of getting the right NLS (native language) options set in the kernel.
I used to really hate the long hours of compiling. Up until now I was building Gentoo on lower end machines to run as servers etc. Usually in the neighborhood of 1ghz with 512ram. On these systems compiling was a grueling experience.
However, having just converted my performance machine to Gentoo for AMD64 (dual booting with XP…for games), I can tell you that compiling is not bad at all on a fast machine. Some of the most dreaded compilations take very little time at all now. Things that would normally take 30 minutes are taking more like 10. I can handle 10 minutes. Furthermore, once your system is up and you have what you want, the compiling is really a non-issue. Its the Stage1 install that will wipe out a day or more depending on your hardware.
Next step is Gentoo OpenSolaris distro.
What a horrifying idea! Solaris distro hell no thanks!
Agreed, and it seems to have been lost on many that Solaris x86 doesn’t just run on ‘anything’. Its built to run on Sun machines sold at Sun prices.
I don’t know about Portaris, but I’ve been using NetBSD’s PKGSRC as a non-root package manager, and it is quite good at it.
Visit http://rfhs8012.fh-regensburg.de/~feyrer/Texts/Own/ and look for “pkgsrc” slides and paper (apendix A).
Portaris ? You surely mean something like Arthritis, right ?
No thanks. All my base are belong to me. Solaris: have it, saw it, used it. For home ? No thanks, with or without Gentoo’s help in it.
Agreed, and it seems to have been lost on many that Solaris x86 doesn’t just run on ‘anything’. Its built to run on Sun machines sold at Sun prices.
No but Solaris X86 has very good support on commercial PC server Hardware for instance it installs flawlessly on my compaq proliant server. I just don’t see the benifit of having 50 different Solaris distros.
>Demigod:So that means that less than one percent of the total portage tree leaves you with a choice.
Well now I am sure you are not using portage !!! Only 1% of ebuild provides bin package because for most of all others, my compilation time is shorter than your downloading time of binary !
True some big packages remain without the option, but then GRP CDs can be quite useful for those who don’t want to wait…
@jp: I choose to install my Gentoo64 from stage 3 + GRP so I am up and running in less than 2 hours. You can always recompile later…
Just great. Now port it to other Unices as well
I’m using Gentoo on about 20 production servers. Neither of them is bleeding edge, but well maintained. Those people working on Gentoo and their packages made my life a whole lot easier!
But what I’m going to do pretty soon, switch all servers to binary upgrades only, and compile those packages on a different server which also will provide them to the production server.
An awful lot of people having very funny ideas about Gentoo and Portage. They look at it as some freakish Linux distro or something.
But I tell you what, most of the internet hosting companies I know are using more and more Gentoo on their servers. And not because it is a nano second faster than debian, because it’s easy to maintain, and darn convienient to use.
Most of us are using ready to install Gentoo images, call it a stage4 tarball if you want. Absolutely hassle free!
And because of that, I’m really looking forward to projects like Potaris. A Ports system in general, especially Portage puts me in control, not some developers trying to find the best mix for everyones need!
I personally dispise those xfree/xorg-x11 dependencies most distros are creating. It’s fairly common for servers to include _only_ whats _absolutely necessary_. And Gentoo can do that. (and of course Free/Net/OpenBSD)
I really love their ports system too.
That was something I missed on Linux for a very long time.
I admit, Gentoo is not meant for everyone. People afraid of the console, or gcc should leave their hands off.
(No offense intended!)