[Gllug] [OT] Appreciation

[Mike Brodbelt]

Juergen Schinker wrote:
> i pointed that out
>> Actually, I'm extremely interested in this debate for practical
>> reasons. Debian seems to be heavily defeating Gentoo, so far.
>>
> Naa your so wrong...Gentoo is heavily defeating Debian, it's
> concept is better, but try it out...

This has been a longish thread already, and AFAICS you're the only one
defending Gentoo. That's hardly "heavy defeat" for Debian, regardless of
the fact that I still haven't seen any credible arguments for Gentoo's
supremacy.

So far , and paraphrasing your arguments slightly, we seem to come down to:-

1/ Gentoo users aren't dependent on how developers built their packages

Debian users tend to be happy with the way software has been packaged,
and when they aren't, there's always "apt-get source foo; vi foo/rules;
cd foo && dpkg-buildpackage". And you only have to compile the packages
where you need something different, not the *entire* *system*.

2/ Gentoo users can download a full ISO instead of a small netinst CD

Sorry, are you seriously claiming this is an advantage ?

3/ Debian stable is old

...but Debian unstable isn't, and on a desktop, you should run Etch or
Sid. On a server, known stability is *far* more important than bleeding
edge software, and if you don't realise this you've never run a serious
system that has people depending on it. And AFAICT, there's no such
beast as "Gentoo stable"

4/ Better performance

For most apps, this is irrelevant - an optimised ls is hardly a win. In
some few specific cases, you may indeed be better off (mplayer comes to
mind, but even there, as long as you can playback full frame, it's fast
enough). However, the cost of that is a vast amount of compute cycles
wasted building stuff over & over again.

The best case I can see for using Gentoo is for learning about the build
tools and how the system hangs together. For that though Linux from
Scratch would be a better choice, on a test system (or an emulated VM on
your Debian box:-) ).

Can you actually present any compelling arguments for Gentoo, or is your
preference just a personal religious thing?

Mike

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