begin quoting John H. Robinson, IV as of Wed, Jan 03, 2007 at 09:14:22PM -0800: > Todd Walton wrote: > > > > Wouldn't it be a benefit that you get to compile it yourself? The > > non-benefit is that you *have* to compile it yourself. I have two > > thoughts about this: 1) I really wish that more packages were > > available pre-compiled in portage. 2) It really doesn't matter, > > though. I mean, c'mon, how much hassle is it to compile a new program > > from source? > > When you have hundreds of systems - and you have to compile libc > and Xorg, amd mozilla. On each. When there is a 0-day vulnerability on > ssh, and you need it done *NOW*. Yes, that 28 minute delay can mean the > difference between preventing a breach, and sending out thousands of SB > 1386 notices, because there was Personally Identifiable Information on > the system.
So it's just a matter of scale? Large collections of computers do change the tradeoffs, but if you're running that big of a shop, you ought to be able to afford an OS that comes with professional 24/7 support. The 28-minute delay argument is a bit disingenuous. That's 28 minutes or so that has to be spent by *someone*, and then it has to be uploaded to some repository, and then you have to manage to update from the repository after it's been uploaded... If you REALLY want to make sure you get your services patched as fast as possible, you'd be downloading the source, compiling it locally, and installing it yourself anyway. And compiling-for-the-local-machine is an embarassingly parallel problem anyway. > There may be a way to build once, then install many times with Gentoo. I > honestly don't know. If this were the case, why bother with the whole > compile on the end user system? It's called rsync, yes? :) > Another drawback is that you are now a QA department of one. When > something in a package beaks, why did it break? What was it compiled > against? What options were used? What optimisations? You may very well > have a very unique package, and the Gentoo maintainer (or whatever the > equivalent is) could be at a complete loss. I must admit, this seems like a short-term gain, long-term benefit. If the Gentoo community can influence developers, then making sure code compiles on a wide range of systems with a wide range of compiler versions using a wide range of compiler options would be a good thing. Code that breaks if it isn't compiled *just* *right* is not a Good Thing. Pressure on developers to avoid such things is actually of benefit to all. > With a centralised build system, the maintainer can point to a standard > package, and say ``try this one'' and have at least some basis. Granted, > an end user system can still have a unique set of packages installed > that could create interesting synergistic effects, or unique hardware > configurations. Adding in a custom-compiled system is adding even more > problems for the troubleshooters. If there are interesting synergistic effects, there's been a failure in modularization. If we just accept such things as commonplace, instead of demanding that such things be rare, we're doing the same thing that Microsoft has done with reboots/reinstalls -- training users to just accept the crappy solution by not presenting anything better. > Gentoo may be fine for a desktop, that is behind a trustable firewall. I > would not run any public services, or anything mission-critical on it. Granted. > Then again, I say the same thing of Debian Unstable, Debian Testing, and > Fedora Core. I'd probably say that about *any* Linux distribution. [snip] > How long would it take to emerge OpenOffice? How long would it take to > compile projectmanager.app? Coming from a RedHat or SuSE world, where > these things may not even be in the repository, looking at Gentoo is > amazing: one command, and you can have it! Coming from the Debian world, > where all the work of compiling and putting together in a usable > fashion, one asks ``why bother?'' What if you're not using _quite_ the same configuration as some Debian testbed? "Why bother?" is a call to conformity to what is supplied, and if you don't have the same sort of system as what is used by the centralized system, well, tough noogies. (Yes, Debian broke X on SPARC, and it hasn't been fixed, and nobody has offered any useful advice ["give me a remote root login" doesn't count] in six months. Why? Not many people bother with Debian on SPARC32 anymore -- whoops.) [snip] > > I can't give a fair comparison of apt to portage, since I'm really not > > familiar with apt. I've heard it's great. But I definitely don't see > > what people have against portage. > > I can't give a fair comparison, either, as I have never used Gentoo. I > still have not found any good argument *for* other than having > to/getting to compile oneself. In theory, compiling locally lets you reconfigure the filesystem to some other standard, which you can't do with binary-only distros, as many programs hard-code in paths. Indeed, it seems the ELF format uses hard-coded paths in the binary. > At least you did not give the pat excuse that by building it from > source, you gain a better appreciation of how it all works together. For > that, I would point towards Linux From Scratch. ...I need to spin that up again. Discovering that glibc was tied to the kernel version was a bit of a nasty shock. I would have bet money that you couldn't make that happen, and I would have lost. > Any other Gentoo users (past, present, future) want to weigh in on this? I have used it. I was greatly dismayed at the python stack trace when running a Java program -- there's some seriously funky magic going on under the hood that offends my sensibilites (and yes, I'd be just as offended if it were TCL or perl). The nominal admin decided that Gentoo was better than Debian, and made the switch one weekend... and I found Gentoo to be less stable, in general, than Debian, with more frequent manual tweaking required after an update than with Debian. (That being said, I've never seen Gentoo get wedged beyond all hope of recovery either, only to the point of despair, while Debian has had fewer problems up to the point where it collapses into hoplessness.) -- Slackware was my first distro, and it calls to me still. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
