[Nottingham] distro chance

Roger Light Roger.Light at nottingham.ac.uk
Mon Jun 7 16:19:53 BST 2004


> >>> huggie at earth.li 06/07/04 12:30 PM >>>
> On Mon, Jun 07, 2004 at 09:12:52PM +1000, Andrew Mason wrote:
> > > Personally, I'd take a look at Gentoo. It's certainly my favourite, although
> > > it'd possibly be even better with precompiled binaries as well. 
> >
> > Yes it would =) 

> But then you'd lose out on the only advantage it has.  I never bought
> the optimising for your processor advantage personally but the
> optimising by compiling out/in stuff might be useful.

I don't believe there are significant gains in optimising for the processor either. Loosing the compiling in/out would be a pain, but then again I mostly use it to optimise on compile time. Do I want to compile the chat client in mozilla? No thanks. If the precompiled binaries were available I wouldn't be waiting for the chat client to compile, so it wouldn't be a problem. This is of course a very limited viewpoint...

I love the init scripts. Seriously, they rock. Based on the way Free(?)BSD does it, each script has a list of dependancies so you don't have to faff around with changing the order of execution with S27 S99 etc, it just does it for you.

I am blissfully ignorant of what other distros are doing, so it is entirely possible they all do this now. It would be nice. I don't intend going back (except when I have to work with the Solaris machines at work... :)

> Still not useful enough for me that I'm prepared to spend my life
> compiling things but then I'm a Debian bigot as you all know.

Can't say it bothers me too much. I update the available packages with a cron job that also emails me if there is anything that can be updated. If there is, I just compile it the next night. Either way, I still probably get things before debian users (stable at least :) I'm just kidding, don't flame back.

Each to their own though - the real reason I settled on Gentoo was that it was the first distro that all of my laptop worked for without any bother. It's been inertia since then.

Cheers,

Roger

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