3 Apr
2005
3 Apr
'05
1:37 p.m.
Hi,
On Sun, 2005-04-03 at 14:39 +0200, Patrick Useldinger wrote:
Hi,
as Slackware seems to be on the decline, I am currently looking for
alternatives to consider in case Slackware stops existing altogether.
Gentoo comes very close to a lot of my criteria: excellent security
information, excellent documentation, an active community, support for
several processors
you mean hardware architectures I presume
and a large central software repository featuring not
only the latest version but also older, perhaps more stable versions.
Debian has this too, although Gentoo gets the newest software more
quickly then Debian (unless you use the right unofficial apt
repositories I guess).
My main concern is the source-based approach. I
developed an allergy
towards source-based software installation when compiling KDE 3.2 for
FreeBSD, and I expect Gentoo to be no better in that respect. I know
that a stage-3 install will save me from compiling anything but the
kernel at first, but an upgrade will certainly involve hours of waiting
for make and portage to finish. No more "oh, wait, I'll just install
this program and then we may go on".
So what's the use?
Nobody knows :)
When you wrote your first Makefile and understood how it works,
you might have had the thought: "wouldn't it be cool if I could
compile my whole distribution like this".
I think Gentoo is the result of someone going ahead and doing it.
It appears that Gentoo is not noticeably faster than
other distros. One advantage of the source-based approach is certainy
the ability to configure each soft, if you wish to, perhaps yielding in
smaller and maybe more secure binaries. But then again, disk space is
cheap and having to have a C compiler on a production machine is not
always a security advantage either.
Hence, my questions:
-1- Does anybody use Gentoo, and what is their experience?
Not me since I think the whole idea is quite ridiculous.
-2- Has anybody really a punchy argument why
source-based software
installation is useful?
It might be useful for example if you want to compile apache
with stack-smashing protection. But then you can do that with
an RPM or DEB based distribution too, it's not difficult.
That's the only positive argument I could come up with :|
(Rant follows)
Some people like the sense of achievement that compiling
/bin/true with "-O3 -leet -superfast!1" gives. But the speed
benefits that can be obtained with such options are mostly in
the 0-5% range, which is below the limit of perception of
ordinary humans. Another fact that is mostly ignored in
speed-related discussions is that for desktop use, the processor
is not the bottleneck, but rather the IO system.
I suspect most perceived speed benefits are due to the placebo
effect.
By the way, Gentoo users are quite unpopular with software
maintainers. This is because they are quite vocal, they often
use dodgy/overclocked hardware and experimental gcc releases, etc.
Then they complain loudly when software fails on their riced-up
systems.
Of course these generalizations don't apply to all Gentoo users -
but a few black sheep quickly give a bad reputation to the whole crowd.
Obligatory related link: http://funroll-loops.org/
Cheers,
Christian Glodt
Regards,
-pu
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