[PLUG-TALK] Gentoo users sound off...

Paul Heinlein heinlein at madboa.com
Fri Jun 4 14:39:05 UTC 2004


On Thu, 3 Jun 2004, Paul Johnson wrote:

> No, I'm saying that Gentoo users tend to be intellectually reckless 
> and quite annoying about it in roughly the same percentages AOL 
> users are.

If 'AOL users' =~ 'the general population' then you're probably right, 
although at that point the same could be said for just about any 
largish group: "Red Hat users," "Debian users," "PLUG members," "Fred 
Meyer customers," or whatever.

> Though something has to be said about people who get wood over 
> wasting hours and hours compiling software to save nanoseconds here 
> and there and somehow miss that it's a serious waste.

I think you're right about the speed advantages. I think my SPARC is 
quicker when running Linux than running Solaris or OpenBSD, but I 
can't tell any difference between one Linux distro and another.

I think the stronger argument about Gentoo is that it allows you to 
build packages with only the dependencies of your choice.

Sometimes the choices are trivial: Do I want lynx compiled with or 
without SSL support?

Sometimes, however, you can build packages that are much different 
than you'd find in a binary-only distro. PHP, for instance, can be 
built with or without a pretty large number of capabilities: Berkeley 
DB, Flash, GD, GDBM, GMP, IAMP, IPv6, Java, JPEG, Kerberos, LDAP, 
various databases, PAM, SSL, XML, etc, etc.

It's nice when you can get that level of customization within the 
bounds of a package-management system. Just set a few keywords in the 
$USE environment variable, and the automated build system handles the 
rest.

I'm not saying that everyone wants or needs that sort of thing, but I 
appreciate it in certain computing environments.

-- Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>




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