On 6/14/05, cothrige <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Well, I have to say that just for one day on this old Pentium3 I am > very impressed. I was a bit intimidated but I do like the final > product. I had wanted to install from sources rather than binary > packages as I had to but without a high speed internet connection I > could not consider it. But as a compromise I like this a lot, and > Debian, Slack and all the others are from binaries as well.
I think I'm not followng the 'binaries' comments. While some of the install happens from binaries, before long you will find that everything is rebuilt from source that you download. It's a pretty reasonable system. My one wish, for the number of times I've done this, is that by definition the LiveCD kernel is good enough to boot the machine so I wish that kernel was installed and the Live CD was gone before I started worrying about choosing kernel options and booting the machine from my ow kernel. That way I'd always have one known-good kernel on the machine. The current install process forces me to fall back to the LiveCD if I mess up the initial kernel build. Anyway, that's a small complaint. > So in > that sense it is no different, but I like the philosophy behind it so > much more than the others. That is why I have wanted to try it out > for so long. I just don't understand why they don't make iso images > of the source packages available as well as the binary stuff. It > would make a more traditional install available for folks like me. > But, that is a small complaint I suppose. In the end it's probably because of some tools you haven't had a reason to investigate yet. Since your machine will be built with the packages you choose AND using the USE flags you choose what you see pretty quickly is that no binary package can be built and distributed with the exact right set of USE flags to please everyone. Some people use nptl, so do not. Some build for speed, others for size. Some for x86, some for the Mac Mini. Anyway, what you'll find is that you'll guess what USE flags you want right now. you'll build your machine and then you'll change your USE flags. This will, underneath it all, break some dependencies that you will want to take care of. Some use flags eliminate portions of functionality. You turn it on then it needs to be there so other things have to be rebuilt. When you start using (or really depending) on binary packages then you get sort of cornered. It doesn't work well. That said I use openoffice-bin and revdep-rebuild always complains. However I'm never going to build OO from source so I just have to live with it as the only appon my system that doesn't pass all the tests. Cheers, Mark -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
