[CLUE-Tech] distro question

[Nate Duehr]

Dale K. Hawkins wrote:

>OK.  I have played with many different distros over the years and have
>recently been contemplating giving gentoo a whirl.  I am not an idiot
>and I do so love to tinker.  It seems there is some experience on the
>list with gentoo.  So, I just wanted to ask people's opinions about
>gentoo.
>  
>

I got annoyed with it, quickly.  Knowing that a security-related emerge 
is available always made me want to just emerge everything at that 
point, and even on an Athlon 2500 that always took forever, it seemed... 
the constant siren call (on my play machine) of "hey there's new stuff 
available" every time the last compile finished... became utterly 
distracting for me.

Granted Debian unstable can be similarly crazy this way, but Debian 
testing is a little bit slower.  Of course you're not guaranteed 
security patches with Debian testing, so... Catch 22.

>I have been using debian quite happily for several years now.  The
>gentoo is a curiousity thing based on the fact that
>
>A) I recently had to upgrade some non-debian software and was hoping
>gentoo might have a better way to handle this situation, and
>  
>
They're both the same in this regard, there are two trains of thought...

1. Compile and build and install somewhere you put everything that is 
non-standard... (/usr/local... /opt... whatever) -- you can obviously do 
this on any Linux system.

2. Build your own package.  On Gentoo you make an ebuild file that will 
build and install the source sanely.  On Debian you roll your own .deb 
using the tools provided.

>B) I saw the gentoo references today and thought what the hell, have I
>really suffered enough lately?
>  
>
Oh no, definitely not.  It's Linux, for goodness sake!  (GRIN)  By 
nature it'll NEVER be "finished".  That's what we love about it, er, 
um... most days.  ;-)

Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com