Now, onto packaging (and this is gonna sound a lot like emerge on
gentoo, I like it!), I'd like to see something that by default has
generic binaries that are compiled in the normal manner. However,
there are times that I'd like to select specific "features" of the
binaries. In gentoo these are called USE flags and let you easily get
some optimized binaries that will do only what you want. Not everyone
is interested in that much flexibility, but when you're trying to get
that extra 10% of performance out of a system, it's priceless.
I think this is the very problem that blastwave faces, as does all
other distributions, just that blastwave is easy to use as an example
as they exist now in a given state. One tries to add what they will
people will need or want, so that in essence you get
one-stop-shopping. Then it becomes apparent that joe user didn't want
xxx feature which bill user wanted, and tom user's company won't let
him install anything that has feature xxx included in it...I have not
used Gentoo very much, only once or twice in the past, but the USE
flags sound interesting, the only problem I see is that it requires
more work on the packaging side to issolate that stuff.
Since Gentoo is compile based, the USE flags generally are directly
transfered to configure options. For example, if you wanted to install
MySQL with '--with-big-tables' you can simply specify the
USE='big-tables' USE flag and everything's taken care of for you. I
can't imagine how much complexity that would add to packaging creation
but I'd love it if someone chipped in.
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