Whenever I see a write-up of Gentoo, it's describe as a system
similar to BSD "ports" where you build packages from source.
The main benefit claimed for this approach is that you get
better performance because all executables are optimized for
exactly the right instruction set.
Where did that bit of apocrypha come from, and why is it
parroted by so many people?
AFAICT, the "performance" benefit due to compiler optimization
is practically nil in real-world usage.
In my experience the huge benefit of source-based distros such
as Gentoo is elimination of the library dependency-hell that
mires other binary-based distros.
For many years I ran RedHat and then Mandrake. After a year or
so, they became impossible to maintain because of library
version conflicts. Every time I tried up upgrade an RPM package
to fix a bug or security hole, it required a handful of
libraries to be upgraded, but doing that would break a bunch of
other RPMs for which upgrades weren't available. The solution
was always to start building stuff from sources. Once you
started doing that, the package manager would get upset because
it doesn't know about some stuff that's installed (unless you
built from source RPMs, which had another set of problems).
The second benefit is that with Gentoo, upgrading a system
actually works over the long-run. With RedHat/Mandrake, things
would gradually deteriorate to the point where the system was
unmaintainable, but attempting to upgrade between major
releases was always futile. I've had Gentoo machines that have
been upgraded for 4-5 years without any significant problems
(failed hard-drives don't count).
The third main benefit I've seen is that there are vastly more
packages available for Gentoo. Putting together and
maintaining an ebuild appears to take a lot less work than
putting together and maintaining a binary RPM package. I've
had far fewer problems with third party ebuilds than I did with
third-party RPMs (on the rare occasions when I found one for
some obscure application I wanted to run). Again, the solution
was always "build from sources".
Are the real benefits of Gentoo too hard to explain to the
unwashed masses, so instead they're told the fairy tale about
imporoved performance?
--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! ! Up ahead! It's a
at DONUT HUT!!
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