[Sussex] One for the Debian and Gentoo people out there :)

[Geoff Teale]

:)  That's actually pretty funny.  There are an awful lot of people out
there who will fuel distro wars without knowing what the hell they are
talking about (luckily most of the Debian v Gentoo stuff on here seems
to be good natured banter).

As someone developing on a Gentoo box and deploying on Debian I've seen
the good and bad of both systems.  Here's some _serious_ (and some
not-so-serious) responses from my own point of view:


>"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
>"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling
>something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more >time
to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable >optimisation
settings."

Hmm, well I not only know the command `nice` and how to use control-z,
but I also have a dual Xeon box which means I can happily test out my
changes by re-emerging Gnome from CVS into my sandbox (and eventually
onto my live system) at the same time as playing a highly productive
game of Enemy Territory or Urban Terror.

Of course I could do that on Debian too - except I'd have to set up my
own chroot'd environment to do safe sand-boxing.  Oh and my SMP wouldn't
work anywhere near as effectively on a stock Debian Kernel (it certainly
wouldn't use the hyper-threading support), nor would my NVidia Quadra FX
card work at all.  Now of course you can say that anyone can compile a
new kernel and install the latest Nvidia drivers on Debian - but that
argument is mutually exclusive with the "but Debian is like tested and
stable to the extreme, dude" argument you're going to want to use in a
minute.  If I use any kernel other than the kernel that was used to test
the packages then it's worthless.


>"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
>"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a
>single program in my life or contributed to an open source project,
>yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow >helps
me contribute to international freedom."

No need to defend this one. I am a full time software developer working
on Linux systems. I actively use Gentoo's CVS e-build to do open source
development work.

Currently I am engaged in adding a driver for Brother P-Touch printers
into CUPS (I've already written external support for Code-128B bar-code
printing for the Brother P-Touch 2420PC)  

>"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
>"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine,
>but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, >but
the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I >must be for
using Gentoo."

Well, the Gentoo install process is still more involved than FreeBSD,
NetBSD or OpenBSD (except OpenBSD onto a Sun Ultra5, which was a pain in
the arse).  However Gentoo has exelent documentation that means just
about anyone who evolved in the last 65 million years can install it if
they're not frightened of a command line.

You only get kudos if you install it from an NFS mounted CD on the other
side of a SLIP link on a 4kbps Acoustic-couple modem.  :)

>"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo."
>"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and >thousands
of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting >for user input.
Even though only the kernel and glibc make a >significant difference
with optimisations, and RPMs and .debs can >be rebuilt with a handful of
commands (AND Red Hat supplies i686 >kernel and glibc packages), my box
MUST be faster. It's nothing to >do with the fact that I've disabled all
startup services and I'm >running BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."

It is possible to get some speed gains from an entirely custom built
system, but it's equally possible to just build an unstable system. 
However you underestimate my personal CPU utilisation - optimised code
means more available cycles, not just faster running for a single
application.

I thinks its fair to say that for every fool who argues compiling
everything makes there machine faster for no good reason, there is
equally a fool who will argue that it doesn't with no more understanding
of the argument he/she is making.

I don't mean to sound rude, but excluding Steve Dobson and I, it
wouldn't be unwise to guess that the number of people on this LUG who
can give me a sensible explanation of why you might want to use
omit-frame-pointer as a compiler optimisation (and what net effect this
would have on say a Pentium 4, an Opteron and an old VAX) probably could
be counted on the fingers of one flipper.

Having that discussion really steps away greatly from the actual points
support compilation.  The main advantages of compilation are:

 - Control other what features are compiled in (usually managed by USE
flags).
 - Transparent development in the package management scheme.
 - Much shorter delay between releases of new versions and patches.

>"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
>"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from >the
third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."

My dual Xeon, hyper-threaded, Serial-ATA, 1.5GB Ram, Nvidia Quadra FX
beast of a machine?  Yes, what of it ;)

>"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..."
>"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be
>resolved by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line, and
>that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages
>instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together
>(which the system wasn't designed for)."

.. well.. you can always just install portage on Red-Hat anyway. 
Actually the biggest dependency screw-ups I ever have to sort out are on
Debian systems that have pulled packages from multiple servers and get
their knickers in a twist because they want Python2.2-2.2.14 when
Python2.2-2.2.15 is already installed, but the python2.2-gtk2 package
their trying to install came from a sever that wasn't yet aware of the
Python2.2-2.2.15 package.  Debian works well right up until the point
when it doesn't and then it does everything it can to stand in your
way.   Of course you can argue that an experienced user wouldn't do
this, and you'd be right.

>"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
>"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software
>makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and
>patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've >just
emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -O9
>-fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."

Yes, but if your hardware was built in the last 18 months you're going
to have to throw away that oh-so-rigorously tested software and put
something of your own on there.  When that something is the kernel then
any testing based on packages compiled against a different kernel is
essentially useless.  

BTW, Gentoo developers also test stuff before releasing into the wild -
we don't just have wild, unstable code lying around portage - the only
way to make this happen is to specifically use CVS packages in unstable
mode - this is really no different to using Debian Unstable.

>"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
>"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the
>near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll >still
eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this >guy I met on
#animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"

OK - "Lets face it Linux is the now, and the next few years, for some
portion of the marketplace".

As far as businesses using Gentoo is concerned, well I now know of 
several business that run on Gentoo, but I'll admit I am as surprised as
anyone because build time is an issue. 

Only deployment boxes (and one developers machine) run on Debian at my
work - moreover that isn't out-of-the-box woody, but woody plus a whole
bunch of our own packages to bring it up to something approaching
usable.

-- 
Geoff Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation