On Wed, 25 Jul 2007, Gregory Stark wrote:
Does gentoo these days have binary packages? source packages do implicitly require custom builds...
You can install with binaries now so it doesn't take forever to get started, but the minute you're adding/updating you're going to be building. The main point I was trying to make is that if you don't do anything special to customize the standard Gentoo compilation setup, the amount of variation between Gentoo builds on different machines isn't significantly greater than that which exists between the various Linux distributions. One could make a case that the big glibc differences between Debian Stable and everybody else right now provides a similar scale of variation in results that would impact reproducibility.
for this situation I would actually agree that Redhat is a better fit in that it's "canonical".
I threw out some criticism suggesting where RedHat is at a slight disadvantage for completeness sake, and so Gavin wasn't completely alone at expressing some distaste for the issues it introduces compared to Gentoo (potentially harder package installation and less flexiblity for running bleeding-edge kernels with RHEL). His preference for Gentoo is completely defensible if you understand his priorities, and I'd hate to see a knee-jerk reaction against that distribution based just on how Gentoo can be abused and how it differs from other Linux variants.
But I run RHEL&Centos on several machines so I certainly wouldn't go so far as to argue against it being appropriate here. The nice thing about RedHat and its clones is that even when you run into a situation where packages might be harder to install than you'd like them to be, the userbase is so big and skilled that the problems are usually visible (odds are good other people are running into the issue as well), reproducible on other builds, and you can get plenty of help resolving them.
-- * Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match
