Technological advantages over Linux

[Paul Mather]

On Fri, 24 Jul 2020 11:24:21 +0200, Peter Boosten <freebsd at boosten.org> wrote:

> Message: 14
> Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2020 11:24:21 +0200
> From: Peter Boosten <freebsd at boosten.org>
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: Technological advantages over Linux
> Message-ID: <7B44C0A4-FCB5-4703-837B-AF2D28667306 at boosten.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> I love FreeBSD a lot, but the pkg system could be more intelligent, for instance I have a gitlab server: in linux, the binaries are updated and all necessary scripts are run to update the database as well. 
> 
> pkg stops after the binary upgrade and presents a webpage with all sort of manual stuff. This notice is lost if you upgrade a lot of packages


Are you running the "Omnibus" edition of GitLab under Linux?  If so, that's not using a standard package manager.  The Omnibus GitLab install uses Chef to do all the "manual" stuff needed to maintain GitLab beyond just the basic install (e.g., running database migrations, precompiling assets, etc.).

Chef runs on FreeBSD, but the GitLab folks don't make their Omnibus Chef recipes FreeBSD-aware.  (For the standard minor version GitLab upgrade, it would be straightforward to write a Salt state, an Ansible playbook, a Chef recipe, or even a shell script to perform those post-upgrade "manual" steps, as it is somewhat rote now.)

So, in the GitLab case, I would say it's more of a support advantage of Linux, not a technological advantage.

Cheers,

Paul.