On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 03:41:17PM -0400, John Check wrote: > And how long does that take vs apt-get update && apt-get dist upgrade? > Take all the milliseconds you shave with flags and deduct 'em from the build > time and pig-dog slowness of a package management system that runs on an > interpreter,
Them's fightin' words :-P I've never found the "pig-dog slowness" of portage to be significant whatsoever. It's completely dwarfed by I don't care about the supposed optimizations, I've never noticed whether gentoo is any faster or what. The things I like are: 1) It Just Works. Dunno if it's my increased experience or gentoo or what, but in the past year I've had fewer complaints with my two gentoo boxes than anything else I've tried. I ran RH 4-7, followed by 2 years of Debian (i tried stable, which was really stable but really ancient; unstable, which was pretty current but became unbootable after updates twice; then testing, which went unbootable after updates once, after which I was done.) 2) For those times I want something bleeding edge from a tarball that's not in the distro yet, it's trivial to tell portage "don't worry, I've got it covered" and still be able to emerge other stuff that depends on it. I did this routinely with alsa and jack for a few months when gentoo was lagging a bit behind some of the bleeding-edge LAD stuff. Worked flawlessly everty time I did it. E.g. if gentoo is still on jack 0.94 and I want to install a hypothetical 0.99 from source, all I do is build and install the tarball, then do emerge inject media-sound/jack-audio-connection-kit-0.99 -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com