Grant Edwards wrote: > Whenever I see a write-up of Gentoo, it's describe as a system > similar to BSD "ports" where you build packages from source. > The main benefit claimed for this approach is that you get > better performance because all executables are optimized for > exactly the right instruction set. > > Where did that bit of apocrypha come from, and why is it > parroted by so many people? > > AFAICT, the "performance" benefit due to compiler optimization > is practically nil in real-world usage. > > In my experience the huge benefit of source-based distros such > as Gentoo is elimination of the library dependency-hell that > mires other binary-based distros. > > For many years I ran RedHat and then Mandrake. After a year or > so, they became impossible to maintain because of library > version conflicts. Every time I tried up upgrade an RPM package > to fix a bug or security hole, it required a handful of > libraries to be upgraded, but doing that would break a bunch of > other RPMs for which upgrades weren't available. The solution > was always to start building stuff from sources. Once you > started doing that, the package manager would get upset because > it doesn't know about some stuff that's installed (unless you > built from source RPMs, which had another set of problems). > > The second benefit is that with Gentoo, upgrading a system > actually works over the long-run. With RedHat/Mandrake, things > would gradually deteriorate to the point where the system was > unmaintainable, but attempting to upgrade between major > releases was always futile. I've had Gentoo machines that have > been upgraded for 4-5 years without any significant problems > (failed hard-drives don't count). > > The third main benefit I've seen is that there are vastly more > packages available for Gentoo. Putting together and > maintaining an ebuild appears to take a lot less work than > putting together and maintaining a binary RPM package. I've > had far fewer problems with third party ebuilds than I did with > third-party RPMs (on the rare occasions when I found one for > some obscure application I wanted to run). Again, the solution > was always "build from sources". > > Are the real benefits of Gentoo too hard to explain to the > unwashed masses, so instead they're told the fairy tale about > imporoved performance? > >
Being a metadistribution, the concept of higher performance isn't quite that much of a fairy tale. If you can easily configure your system to a specific purpose, that would ideally lead to better performance, whether it be due to the specialization of the system or at least a placebo effect on the user. Gentoo is honestly my first linux system, so I don't really have the experience of library conflicts of binary distros. People in general will usually just want confirmation that something has benefits over what they currently have, irregardless of evidence of exactly why it is better, so that may be part of why so many supporters "parrot" the same view regarding Gentoo. On the other hand, I just take a lot of it as peace of mind in that all the responsibility for how my system is running is directly mine, as opposed to being able to blame someone who made a bad RPM. I like knowing any little factor of my system and what it's doing.
