Sluggish Mandrake WAS RE: [PLUG] Fedora change...

[Jason Van Cleve]

Quoth Jeme A Brelin, on Thu, 13 Nov 2003 17:45:58 -0800 (PST):

> It's counter-intuitive if your intuition is only the most simplistic
> kind of understanding.

*sigh*  I appreciate your feedback, Brelin, but must you really always be so abrasive?

> I think that "if you know what you're doing" means "if the package
> managers carefully tune their makefiles and compiler options for
> application-specific performance boosts".

So now what I would know is, couldn't gentoo make the same tunings with a patch to the makefile?  I would expect gentoo to be able to tune things as well as any other distro--but then, mine is "only the most simplistic kind of understanding".  (Perhaps certain tweaks won't work with certain compiler options, but I believe the ebuild can override those options as needed, so it ought to be able to build pretty much the same binaries as Debian or 'Drake, if they are actually faster per se.)

> That is to say, the package management in Debian (or the like) is very
> specific.  I think Gentoo tries to set system-wide compilation options
> instead of application-specific compilation options.  That last bit

There are user-definable global defaults, but see my last parenthetical.

> Perhaps if a system like Gentoo could be built where compilation
> options are deduced by some intelligent process that merges
> application considerations with system considerations, a source-based
> distribution could be really fast.

Well, that's part of the draw, so I hope gentoo can improve those benchmarks in time.  Looking at that linmagau.org article, I do suspect that a better kernel than the "stock" gentoo kernel would have helped somewhat.

--Jason