30 Dec
2011
30 Dec
'11
2:05 p.m.
On 30/12/11 8:24 AM, David Riley wrote:
On Dec 30, 2011, at 6:55, Liam Proven<lproven at
gmail.com> wrote:
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.
Yes. And the sophistication (and constraint system and solver) has
improved noticeably over the years. I notice the FreeBSD ports system
has a little of this flexibility too; to a Gentoo admin it sure felt
more comfortable to set up than binary Linux. (I had the opportunity to
compare directly last year, as my VPS provider unfortunately shunted me
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 from FreeBSD to Centos. Everything was MUCH more
painful in the latter.)
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).
Having used Gentoo on servers and desktops, I agree that it *is* more
difficult to administer on desktops. But that's what those other
distributions are for ;-)
--Toby
- Dave