Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

… about making Gentoo the platform of choice for <insert use here>. We’re already working hard on making Gentoo the best choice for webserving using Apache, PHP, and web-based applications.

But how well are we really doing?

Although it took a long time (it had to), with the Apache refresh we now deliver both Apache 1 and Apache 2 in a way that looks very close to what you’d expect to find if you downloaded and built Apache for yourself by hand. Experienced Linux users now have one less thing to surprise them if they choose to migrate to Gentoo. Tick in the box for that, maybe?

But, on the downside, the release caused a lot of pain for our existing users. We’ve had a range of complaints, and no matter how justified our answers are, we can’t ignore the fact that some of our users were left unhappy by the changes and the way they were rolled out. Hopefully some good will come from that, in the form of improving the way that Gentoo communicates with its users via proposals like emerge –news. But will that be enough?

PHP 5.0 has been out for well over a year now, and is about to be superceded by PHP 5.1; but there is currently no stable PHP 5 package in Portage. We’ve had a lot of complaints about this, including well-meaning offers from users to do it for us. On the surface, that doesn’t look too good. And we’ve still to unleash the sort of pain that the Apache refresh caused our users. I imagine that some of our users won’t be happy with that either.

But, on the upside, we’ve completely revamped our PHP support, both for now and for the future. We now support systems with both PHP4 and PHP5 installed at the same time - an important requirement, given upstream’s lack of planning on this topic, and PHP5’s lack of backwards-compatibility. We also support installing and upgrading extensions separately for each version of PHP. We must be doing something right, as I’ve been told that Gentoo has its users both inside Zend and amongst the PHP contributor community.

Web-based applications - now there is a constant race between the black hats who want to exploit the security holes that are always being found in the damn things, and our security and web-apps teams to get our packages patched and out to users so that they can upgrade and be covered - for now. That’s right; upgrade. Via portage. How many other leading Linux distros provide support for installing and upgrading web-based apps via the standard package manager? Exactly.

It has its faults - and they’re all my fault, as I designed and coded it - but our webapp-config tool gives Gentoo something that none of the other distros currently have. It’s very limited - but we are learning from those limitations, and that’ll show us what we need to do next. And, thanks to Gunnar Wrobel and Renat Lumpau, we now have a much faster and more reliable version written in Python, which I’m hoping will see us through the next year or so, and buy us the time we need to go away and come back with its replacement.

That’s how I think we’re doing, but I’m the wrong person to judge. I’m responsible for the direction we’ve taken on all these things for the last two years, even if others have done all the real work and fixed all my bugs. On those occasions that I’m forced to use a RedHat Linux Enterprise Server box, I really want to rip it out and replace it with Gentoo - because I think that Gentoo’s much closer to how I want a webserver to be than RedHat ever will be.

But what do you want next?

I’d love to hear from our users on how we’re doing. I’ve created this thread in the Gentoo Forums for you to post your views on how we’re doing, and where we should be going next. I hope we get to hear all sides - those who are unhappy as well as those who like what we’re trying to do.

I’ll be reading it with interest.