On Monday 10 Mar 2014 10:08:06 yaro@marupa.net 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