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> What exactly is the real advantage of a source based distro?
I never used gentoo, and I don't necessarily subscribe to the idea. However,
I'll take a stab at answering with what I believe are potential positives.
The way I see it, gentoo is a pain the first time, and after that you're
golden. You don't have to recompile everything anymore, and when changes
come out you just recompile portions. At least, in my ideal world, changes
are just patchsets.
Another good thing is if a vulnerability is released along with a patch, you
can immediately patch yourself and recompile (and with make and typical C/C++
code, you're only recompiling a portion of the package, not the entire
thing). Binary packages require the distribution maintainer to recompile
with their flags, QA test, release, and you have to reinstall an enitre
package.
You'll notice very few changes with most packages with respect to interactive
performance, if you're talking about compiler optimization flags. That's
mostly due to kernel optimizations.
All that said, I can't see doing this on a slow laptop alone. If you have
several machines, one being a fast compile server, then you don't have any
serious issues with recompile times. For me the primary issue boils down to
control over your distribution. Gentoo is ultimate control.
Regards,
Dan W.
--
-- Daniel Widyono --
-- www.widyono.net --
-- www.cis.upenn.edu/~widyono --
--
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