On Wed, Nov 03, 2004 at 09:42:07PM +1100, Simon Bowden wrote: > On Wed, 3 Nov 2004, Grant Byers wrote: > > >Distribution maintainers generally go to great lengths to ensure code is > >compiled properly for a particular package and the package is usually well > >tested before mainstream release. Distributions such as Debian take this > >one > >step further, breaking this down to package maintainers. > > I don't think Debian is particularly special in this respect.
I used it as an example because of it's popularity. I phrased this a little backwards. Could have cited Slackware as the outside the square example rather than Debian as the common example ;-) > >2. Do I have the knowledge and skills to do a better job than these > >distribution/package maintainers? > > Gentoo uses the same strategy - it works by the package maintainer > providing a build script (ebuild). The main advantage of gentoo over other > distros is that the build script can take notice of global, or > package-specific variables that affect compile-time options. > Gentoo's package management reminds me a lot of portage, as used in FreeBSD. I was never really fond of it, but it's really a matter of personal taste/requirements. You have me interested in the package specific compile-time options. I was previously only aware of this possibility by specifying CFLAGS at emerge time on a per package basis. Could you provide an example of how this works? > I'm primarily a Debian user - low maintenance, basic requirements. But for > some of my devel work, being able to install any package that would > require manual compilation (really learning configure flags etc) means > that Gentoo makes things easier. In my case, I decided to try Gentoo to take advantage of an x86_64 processor after weighing up the alternatives. The distro i've used for the past 4 years or so doesn't yet support native x86_64. My stay with Gentoo was short (~2 weeks), but this was due to me blowing an array away in order to diagnose a hardware problem. Rather than re-install it, I opted to go back to my old distro. I'm more than happy using it in x86 mode for now. When you stick with a distro for long enough, you become kinda biased towards it ;-) Cheers, Grant -- Kaufman's First Law of Party Physics: Population density is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the keg. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
