William Hubbs wrote: > On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 05:42:54PM +0100, bn wrote: > > So, I would really want to understand where the Gentoo flexibility beats > > down a binary distro. > > > Don't get me wrong -I like Gentoo. Really. But the claim that a binary > > distro is "unfixable" just because I had someone compiling it for me > > instead of having emerge doing the job, looks odd to me. > > For me, one big difference is in our use flags. > > Binary distros have to force you to install packages with all of their > dependencies, but that is not required on gentoo since you can select > which features you want to support. > > Another difference is that, since you are compiling everything from > source, with the correct CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS settings in make.conf, you > can optimize the binaries you produce to take full advantage of your > processor, which you can't do on a binary distro since everything is > already compiled for you. >
I agree with this 100%. I remember Mandrake and how it would install a whole bunch of stuff just because I selected one package. It wasn't that they were a dependency or anything but that the only choice you had was 'all or nothing'. They built-in support for a lot of things when they built a package so it pulled in all its buddies to. This and the upgrade process was why I switched to Gentoo. Dale :-) :-)
