30 Dec
2011
30 Dec
'11
1:24 p.m.
On Dec 30, 2011, at 6:55, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
The idea of *custom-compiled binaries* with
system-specific
optimisations that will almost certainly be subtly different from
every other user's out there, thus offering a myriad of potential
differences in behaviour or tiny incompatibilities with 3rd-party
vendors' binaries, drivers, or whatever, on a server, gives me the
screaming heebie-jeebies. It is the /absolute *last* thing I'd want/
on a server - it is very, *very* undesirable indeed, from my POV,
which is why I am, to say the least, curious as to why someone would
see this as something they /wanted/!
That may have been the original intent behind Gentoo, and it's probably why I
originally started using it, but I think the real benefit these days is comfigurability of
options. It's nice to be able to specify (on a global or package level) what options I
want to build with. For example, netatalk for the longest time did not have DHX2 on
Debian/Ubuntu unless youanually downloaded the source RPM and built it with the crypto. In
Gentoo, that sort of thing is generally in a USE flag.
The system is not without its problems, of course; I recently had to spend quite a while
on my home server cleaning out old dependencies that had accumulated for a long time
because I had been unaware of the magical incantations to do so (because their
documentation is rather non-obvious).
- Dave