On Wed, 3 Nov 2004, Grant Byers wrote:
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2. Do I have the knowledge and skills to do a better job than these distribution/package maintainers?
Gentoo uses the same strategy - it works by the package maintainer providing a build script (ebuild). The main advantage of gentoo over other distros is that the build script can take notice of global, or package-specific variables that affect compile-time options.
Gentoo's package management reminds me a lot of portage, as used in FreeBSD. I was never really fond of it, but it's really a matter of personal taste/requirements. You have me interested in the package specific compile-time options. I was previously only aware of this possibility by specifying CFLAGS at emerge time on a per package basis.
Could you provide an example of how this works?
Hmmmm, not entirely sure about explicity extra compiler flags. It remembers any USE flags you use between builds. Not sure about CFLAGS etc... my gentoo box isn't on atm, so can't check and give a more useful answer, sorry.
In my case, I decided to try Gentoo to take advantage of an x86_64 processor after weighing up the alternatives. The distro i've used for the past 4 years or so doesn't yet support native x86_64. My stay with Gentoo was short (~2 weeks), but this was due to me blowing an array away in order to diagnose a hardware problem. Rather than re-install it, I opted to go back to my old distro. I'm more than happy using it in x86 mode for now. When you stick with a distro for long enough, you become kinda biased towards it ;-)
Certainly. I still run Debian on all bar one of my machines. Gentoo's emerge sync + -u world (a-la apt-get update, upgrade) takes too long for me to want it on anything serious. OTOH, on a server box I wouldn't have the same cruft as on the desktop/gaming one, plus having to compile everything would encourage me to keep it lean :)
Cheers,
- Simon -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
