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Re: [PLUG] Re: why Gentoo
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On Sat, July 16, 2005 9:03 am, Pat Regan wrote:
>
> I will have to expose my ignorance of Gentoo... Does Gentoo actually
distribute changes via patches instead of full tarballs? If so, then I
am more impressed with their package manager than I was before. That is
very smart.
Yes, sometimes it will just patch, but most of the times it will
recompile. There are lots of packages that have -rN (int N), which
indicates that the package has had some patches applied (usually by Gentoo
devs). The advantage of having a source package is that all the dev has to
do is add the patch location and tell the ebuild to apply patches on
compile, and release the ebuild (after testing it, of course). This is
_much_ faster than a binary release.
> I didn't have high expectations on my attempt to optimize Firefox. I
just > wanted to see if all the crazy optimization flags the Gentoo guys
use lived > up to the hype :).
I don't particulary use Gentoo because of the compiler optimizations. Like
you said, unless you run benchmark tests or such, you're not going to
notice any diff (prelink will speed things up a whole lot though).
However, I love the fact that I have USE flags, and I can specify if I
want X, ldap or postgresql (for example) support for different apps, and
if I don't, it won't compile support for them and install the related
software. There's now way you can efficiently do this with a source
distro.
> I don't compile too many things from source, but I have at least one or
two packages handy to check out. My 2.6 kernel tree is 330 MB, source +
object, is almost 10 times bigger than the tarball. I still have a copy
of Freeciv 2.x laying around from before there was a Debian package. The
tarball is 8 MB, source plus object is 126 MB. I use Emacs CVS, I don't
seem to have the source around anymore, but I recall it taking up quite
a bit of room after compiling.
Like Luke said, a lot of packages have CVS ebuilds out there, which get
the nightly update so you're always up-to-date, with portage knowing about
it.
I've always built a kernel from source. I really dislike precompiled
kernels (and that includes genkernel) because you have so many (useless)
modules.
>
> I know that is a terribly small sampling but if that holds true I would
be afraid to see how big my Gentoo source cache would become. Anybody
have any real world number for this?
The source cache? All the tars are in /usr/portage/distfiles. You can opt
to keep them there, or remove upon install. (it's in make.conf, under
FEATURES). You can also use ccache, and specify how big you want it to be.
> I don't have the patience for ultimate control anymore, but I am glad it
is there for those that need it. I know there have been plenty of times
when Debian unstable has been behind enough version to ALMOST make me
want to roll my own. My laziness nearly always kicks in first :).
The problem with Debian is the package base. It has stable, and unstable,
and testing branches, but they're all pretty old. Unstable should be as
portage (newest packages). One of my roommates has been a big Debian fan
and a few weeks ago he switched to Gentoo on his desktop because the
packages were so old. X.org was just introduced last week (I think). Not
to mention that if you want 1 package from unstable/testing, you have to
switch your entire tree, which means new gcc, glibc and probably a lot
more, to then find it almost impossible to downgrade. With gentoo, all i
have to do to get a testing package is ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~x86 emerge -av
package and it's there.
- -Cos
- --
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