[Sussex] Debian news...

[Geoffrey J. Teale]

"Paul Graydon" <paul at paulgraydon.co.uk> writes:

> Which is one reason I'll be ditching Gentoo shortly from the box.  It's
> a nice little thing, SFF system with an XP-2500M running in it, but if I
> have to compile KDE on it one more time I'll scream.  

Yup, if it gets in the way of doing productive things it get's old
quite quickly.  I now tend to use Arch Linux which defaults to binary
but lets me compile packages when I want to.   No USE flags in Arch,
but hacking the packages and keeping you're own repository is trivial
(the Arch Build System (ABS) is the single greatest feature of Arch).

> Even having
> boosted the ram it still takes a long time to do that compile..
> Ultimately its just not worth it.  The benefits are marginal in having a
> self-compiled entire system.  Sure, optimised binaries are good and
> worth it, but not the whole system compiled on a box. 

The value of the optimisations are _very_ dependent on the use of the
machine.  If you're not getting value from USE flags then Gentoo as a
whole is probably delivering you much benefit for your compiles.

> If I do go back
> to Gentoo in the future it'll be to a Stage3 build.  I've done stage1
> twice now and feel a good sense of accomplishment, but practicality?  

I'm always slightly amused by the satisfaction people get from
building a gentoo box - I got it too the first time I did it.  Now it
is so well documented that it takes a particular "talent" to get it wrong.

> I almost certainly wouldn't run it in a production environment
> unless it was on a huge mainframe linux server with lots of dumb
> terminals hooked up to it, or for a good sized database cluster.
> For that every ounce of performance squeezed would probably be worth
> it, and it'd be sufficiently parrallelised to speed up the
> compilation significantly!  

Eh?

Mainframes are I/O beasts, not CPU time beasts.  Something like an
Orion Multisystems 96 way desktop cluster would make a "good" Gentoo
box :-).

>One despondant user complained on the Gentoo forums a few months ago
>that whe he'd installed it on his couple of hundred processor
>mainframe system, it had only been able to use 80 odd CPUs for
>compiling.  Used all of them once it was up and running though.
>Still, his system was running X-Windows on a large number of dumb
>terminals around the place he worked and needed that power
>apparently.

Sounds very odd to me... 


-- 
Geoff Teale
CMed Technology            -   gteale at cmedresearch.com
Free Software Foundation   -   tealeg at member.fsf.org