Hacker News Reader

Comment by pythonist | Hacker News Reader

The practical side of distributions is package management in every sense. From the point of package management software (dpkg, rpm, apt, yum), repository size (official packages supported), standards in maintenance of the packages, Debian is the winner. That means that your sysadmin work will be much pleasant, and enjoyable. Having to reinstall 100+ servers from CentOS 5 to CentOS 6 will be remembered as the lowest point in my work experience so far. I still regret not convincing my boss to migrate to Debian or Debian based distribution.

I do maintain both rpm and deb packages for the company that I work for, personal projects (only deb) and community. Working on Debian related projects is always nicer and enjoyable, at least for me.

View on HN

Having worked with both, and been intimately involved in package/repository creation and maintenance, I would have to disagree completely.

I'm not sure how you were managing it, but I've installed very large bases if redhat systems, from dozens of individually configured systems to clusters of thousands of nodes. I would say that neither are too difficult for general deployment, but redhat's kickstart system had a leg up on Debian for years.

I'd also say that the yum/rpm repository system is far easier to manage. Setting up internal repos, and making custom packages takes so much less work in the redhat ecosystem, because the sets of tools are much better integrated. Setting up a custom signed apt repo takes a lot more work, and research into various sources of documentation. Don't even get me going on trying to sign and verify a deb on it's own.

This sounds more that your experience with Debian tools is much weaker then with RHEL based ones. The discussion on this is endless, both systems have advantages, I just prefer Debian from majority of reasons.

I was more or less responding to the focus of your comment being:

> "Having to reinstall 100+ servers from CentOS 5 to CentOS 6 will be remembered as the lowest point in my work experience so far."

I've worked with both very extensively, I just don't see this as the case at all if one is well prepared, and wanted to point out that RHEL systems aren't lacking in that respect. I have numerous ubuntu systems that are lined up for a 10.04 -> 12.04 upgrade, and I don't see it as being any more or less difficult than the RHEL 5 -> 6 transitions I've done, just different.

The difference is that reinstallation requires more work and it is more difficult then upgrades. What I wanted to say is that I would recommend everyone to try to avoid massive reinstallations between RHEL clones major versions, especially if you are supporting large number of services and fast development cycles,

The other big difference is in regards to upgrades - I've upgraded Debian servers in-place for years. Even in the announcement this post links to the upgrade instructions are "reinstall".

The differences in packaging systems, and similar are largely something you can learn about. But the idea of reinstalling to upgrade has always struck me as something I'd rather avoid.

Note that "reinstall" is for CentOS 4 or 5; sub-versions of CentOS 6 are supposed to upgrade seamlessly.

And they do upgrade seamlessly. That is 6.1 to 6.x and so on. Not 5 to 6.

> Even in the announcement this post links to the upgrade instructions are "reinstall"

That's because that is the safest course of action. You can upgrade between major versions, and instructions on how to are given.

The long term support model of RHEL lends itself more to a decom and migrate OS upgrade schedule instead of follow the latest version.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com