On Wed, Nov 03, 2004 at 09:28:58PM +1100, Ken Foskey wrote: > On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 19:55 +1100, Grant Byers wrote: > > > Before chosing a distribution such as Gentoo, you really need to stop and > > ask yourself ;- > > > > 1. Do I have the time and patience to read all the relevant documentation, > > forums, bug reports etc for each and every package? > > > > 2. Do I have the knowledge and skills to do a better job than these > > distribution/package maintainers? > > > > 3. Am I prepared to research dependancies for a given package, then compile > > each with the appropriate set of compiler flags? > > > > 4. How does Gentoo really help me in achieving any of the above? > > (particularly #3) > > While I do not disagree with this in principle please let's stick to the > facts. The packages are supplied by gentoo packagers who do maintain > the packages to the best of their ability. The average gentoo user does > not have to concern themselves with tracking. >
The point I was trying (so poorly) to make here was in relation to package specific compile flags. Rather than jump straight in and emerge a particular package and letting emerge build all the dependancies, the dependancies dependancies etc. etc., in order to get the widely believed benefits from Gentoo, you would first need to gather your dependancies, determine optimal compile flags and then CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -foo -bar" emerge <package> etc. Of course this sounds incredibly impractical, but in order to obtain the benefits incorrectly touted by so many Gentoo users, this would need to be reality. I don't mean to come across as negative towards Gentoo, nor it's maintainers. All distributions have their place, I just believe the benefits of Gentoo are quite often misunderstood. Cheers, Grant -- Kaufman's First Law of Party Physics: Population density is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the keg. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
