[Gllug] [OT] Appreciation

[Rob Crowther]

John Winters wrote:
> I confess I haven't used Gentoo in a few years so I'm not familiar with 
> its configuration process.  How does it achieve the same degree of 
> guaranteed stability? 

I expect the way to do it in Gentoo would be to pin your key packages at 
the particular major versions using portage configuration files.  It 
seems that this is a known issue among Gentoo developers, but not much 
has been done about it:

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0019.html

Also, there are releases, though not really in the traditional sense of 
a release constituting a set of packages of certain versions - more of 
an update of the packages distributed on the install CD. With an 
installed system you just have to update a symlink to a make profile to 
change the 'release' you're on:

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/release/2006.1/2006.1.xml

IMX the stability is poor compared to binary package distributions, but 
I have a lot of 'unstable' ebuilds installed because I wanted to play 
with stuff.  Also I've never bothered to install the utilities which 
capture all the "You should now edit your config file to say <x>" that 
gets lost when doing a long emerge so I've probably brought some 
instability on myself.  However I was using Gentoo 'for fun' rather than 
as a regular day to day OS so I could put up it.

I don't think the performance gains are entirely imaginary.  Certainly 
on the laptop I had it installed on it made things seem much faster than 
the same laptop running Ubuntu (I set the compiler to optimise for size 
of executable).  I also saw some performance measurements once (though I 
can't find any reference to them now) which indicated Firefox could be 
speeded up by 5% to 10% by using the extended instruction set available 
in SSE/MMX CPUs.  In practice though, I think the average Gentoo desktop 
user ends up switching on all the use flags and therefore enjoys the 
same amount of bloat you'd get with a binary package distribution.

Rob
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