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

Jeme A Brelin jeme at brelin.net
Fri Jun 4 21:48:08 UTC 2004


On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, Paul Johnson wrote:
> That's not quite true.  Among Debian Users, PLUG members and Fred Meyer
> customers, I have a reasonable assurance that the person I'm speaking
> with has something remotely resembling a clue.  You just don't get that
> with AOL users.

A clue about what?  That's just ridiculously specious.

Sure, more likely than not, AOL users don't know much about, say, the peer
to peer nature of the internet.  But I'll bet there are hundreds of
thousands of AOL users who know more about machining tools or playing go
than you do.

I can also ASSURE YOU that most Fred Meyer customers are totally clueless
about Fred Meyer.  Ask them what aisle contains refrigerator magnets or
what the profits were last year or even who owns the thing and they'll
have no clue.

Cluelessness is relative.

> > I think the stronger argument about Gentoo is that it allows you to
> > build packages with only the dependencies of your choice.
>
> If you just use Debian to start with, you don't have dependencies you
> don't need.

That's worthy of putting on a page like that "Gentoo Ricer" (a totally
offensive racial slur, by the way) page that you linked.

Debian contains all kinds of horrendous dependencies that you don't need.
Build a stable LDAP server without X, for example.

And what if you WANT compiled-in support for something that isn't
supported in the Debian binary?  You have to build your own packages,
then.  Not impossible, but not much different from maintaining a Gentoo
system.

> > Sometimes the choices are trivial: Do I want lynx compiled with or
> > without SSL support?
>
> You can get it either way with Debian.

That one package, sure.  Not so with many other options.

I'm currently a Debian user and have been for many years.  But for a
couple of years there, I was building my desktop systems (and a couple of
lightweight servers) from scratch for the flexibility.  I started this
before Gentoo and I much prefer getting my source packages from the
maintainer, so I likely wouldn't have used it anyway.  But there is a
consistent, intelligent rationale for using it or something like it --
some of the people quoted just aren't using it -- just as there is a
consistent, intelligent rationale for using a system like Debian -- but
you're not using it.

And by the way, while some of the quotes on that linked page do show a
surprising lack of clue, others are very straightforward and dissed or
dismissed just because they show zealous support, admiration, or
astonishment.  Several quotes were just something like, "Man, the USE
variable is the coolest thing!"  You know what?  It is pretty cool.  I've
never used it, but I can see the value.  I'd do whatever I could to help
Debian implement a feature where I could just add "-kde" to some config
file and choose packages at random rest-assured that I will not end up
installing any KDE components.  That'd be the shit.  (Or "-X" for a server
system... very handy.)

J.
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     Jeme A Brelin
    jeme at brelin.net
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