[CLUE-Tech] distro question

[Nate Duehr]

On Jun 10, 2004, at 7:41 PM, Adam Bultman wrote:

> I like gentoo for a few different reasons:
> 1.  It is source based, but requires very little intervention from me.

I'm not being a nit-pick, I'm actually interested in *your* personal 
answer to this question: I hear a lot of people say they like 
"source-based" distros, but I've yet to find a distro that didn't 
include source (because it's required by the GPL to provide it) 
packages.  What does going direct from source on your machine buy you 
other than the *possible* benefits of optimizations like -O3, etc.  
(And I put *possible* because I know that's a raging debate... the 
performance gain isn't always that much.)

> 2.  Dependencies are solved automagically.

I also question this one: I haven't seen any package-based distros not 
have this either?  What do you mean?

> 3. I don't have to surf the net to get new packages.

This one I understand in the RPM world, but I don't "get" when talking 
about Debian and maybe SuSE.  They both have incredible amounts of 
pre-compiled packages and it usually doesn't take very long for someone 
to create on and put it in the official "unstable" branches of those 
distros if something new comes along.  (And then it's super-easy 
usually to backport them if you're not on the "unstable" branches.) ???

> 4. It doesn't have problems like RPM and APT have (and yes, I know how 
> to use both).

I'm not very versed in Gentoo, but I thought there were problems with 
getting your USE= flags wrong early-on and then having to force 
rebuilds of things later if you didn't put everything + the kitchen 
sink in your first cut at your USE= setup?  (I seem to recall running 
into that anyway... forgetting to have for example "kde" in there and 
then adding it later meant that anything that was built before needed 
to be rebuilt, right?)

Granted USE= is a weird one, and most of the so-called "binary-based" 
distros include far too many shared libs on most systems that you may 
not ever use... so I understand the dilemma with that, but it seems to 
me that it's a shared dilemma with differing approaches to the problem?

> 5.  HArd to install programs (gnucash, mplayer, xine) work fine and 
> install easy.

Hmm... I'm just not sure I have enough thought power tonight I tackle 
the opposite side of that one... too tired.  :-)

> I'm a lazy person. To get what I want in fedora, Red Hat, slackware, 
> debian, I have to go through this huge process at install.  It takes 
> me several hours of annoying tweaking and installing to get those 
> systems running, only to find I forgot some stuff and have to get it.

Um, I think all machine builds are this way... in binary package based 
installers you select a large chunk of packages and they download 
forever and eventually the machine's ready to go.  In Gentoo, you 
download source forever, build forever and then the machine's ready to 
go... it seems a wash, or perhaps even longer on the Gentoo way of 
doing things???

> With gentoo, I get things started (I can do it by heart on alpha, 
> sparc, and x86) and I just queue things up.  I start it before I go to 
> bed, wake up, see things running, do what  I need to do, and by the 
> end of the day, it's done, I have X running, and all of my apps. Yes, 
> there is waiting involved.  But c'mon.  I'd rather spend 12 hours 
> waiting for a slew of programs to install than search for 3 hours 
> trying to find all dependencies for fedora, then finding a working 
> mirror, etc.

With Fedora I would definitely agree with you - it drives me insane 
setting up a Fedora/RedHat desktop system.  But I'm not sure I agree 
with Debian being any time-line different than Gentoo in the initial 
setup stages...???

> Some people say that Gentoo is for Mandrake newbies that have moved 
> on, thinking they are leet (also, that gentoo is the 'rice rocket' 
> version of the computer geek).  Eh. Whatever. I'm just lazy.

Me too.  I'm just asking questions.

> I've run a lot of distros (slack red hat 6 6.2 7.2 7.4 8) suse debian 
> turbolinux beehive fedora) , and I think I've settled on gentoo. Give 
> it a whirl; I think you find you'll like it.  I did.

I did, and I *liked* it, but I hated waiting for my slow-ish machines 
to compile all the time.  I think I'd enjoy it better if I had a 
smoking CPU and fast disks.  (GRIN)

I dunno... to be honest setting up a new machine always sucks if you 
want all the toys you'd gotten used to on the last machine!  (GRIN)  
dpkg --get-selections > /tmp/myselections sure helps a lot on Debian 
though... copy that file to the new box, and tell dpkg 
--set-selections, launch dselect one time to give it a chance to 
straighten out any whacky dependencies caused by the machine move 
(rare), and then hit Update and walk away.

Sounds like we take similar approaches with different tools.

They're all great, aren't they!

(Of course, my BSD-loving friend would dogpile in here and totally 
change this conversation around... heh... but that's a COMPLETELY 
different story to tell... and there's just not time tonight...)

Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com