[Zope] Linux vs. UNIX vs. BSD

[Mike Renfro]

On Tue, Aug 20, 2002 at 10:55:14AM +0100, Peter Bengtsson wrote:

> For dev and desktop I personally prefer Mandrake, but what I like
> becomes irrelevant when it's time to set up a serious server for
> production use.

I'm compelled to put in my two cents for Debian GNU/Linux now:

- performance should be identical to any other Linux distribution on
  the same hardware.

- configurability should also be identical, or exceeding other
  distributions. There's no overarching GUI configurator, but a
  combination between good policy on how packages are organized and
  tools never overriding your own settings without substantial
  warnings and chances to back out is nice.

- not sure what you mean by "ease of use" and "lack of hacks". Most
  all common tasks (adding/deleting users, etc. ) already have scripts
  to handle them. Debian doesn't do much GUI integration, so this may
  count against your ease of use. On the other hand, I can administer
  a Debian server with a modem-enabled Palm.

- RDBMS integration is there: packages already built for the usual
  Unix SQL servers.

- Backup should be comparable to any other Unix. There's tar, dump,
  cpio, and afio for low-level tools (don't just use cat
  /dev/hdwhatever, please). There's tob, taper, afbackup, amanda and
  others for high-level tools. You can of course always pay for BRU,
  Veritas, or whatever normally runs on Linux.

- ZEO should be a non-issue, as well. If you can get it running
  anywhere, you shouldn't have any extra difficulties.

Downsides include the historically slow release cycle (Zope went from
2.1.6 to 2.5.1 during the last Debian stable release), which can be
somewhat mitigated by building your own packages, or doing what lots
of people do: building it from source in /usr/local. One could always
install something other than the "stable" release of Debian on a
server, but I'd not recommend it for the inexperienced (it'll be
similar to running some other Linux distribution's normal
releases). Debian's stable releases are very, very stable, and if your
server hardware is supported, they're about trivially maintainable.

-- 
Mike Renfro  / R&D Engineer, Center for Manufacturing Research,
931 372-3601 / Tennessee Technological University -- renfro@tntech.edu