[Sussex] Online with Ubuntu

Thomas Adam thomas at edulinux.homeunix.org
Tue Feb 8 11:59:03 UTC 2005


On Tue, Feb 08, 2005 at 09:19:13AM +0000, Geoffrey Teale wrote:
> Gentoo has come a long way... once upon a time, what is now called a
> "stage 1" build took several days. Of course, back then we compared it
> to "Linux from scratch" and saw that it was good.

But that's all it is -- LFS with some wrapper scripts around the stuff
to make it appear to be doing this faster (and indeed prettier and more
colourful).  At least with LFS, one can get one's hands dirty, and
actually understand what's going on under the hood.  With Gentoo, it's
more for the "wow" factor, and psychological effect that actually,
because one is compiling everything from scratch, that it is somehow
faster.

> Gentoo has become a much more general purpose distro these days,
> mostly on the strength of it's package management system.

Oh really?  I have viewed Gentoo's "emerge" as nothing more than a
wrapper around "apt-get source / apt-get -b build dep".  Indeed, if one
really wanted to, one could do this process under Debian for most (if
not all) packages.

You have to ask yourself if all this supposed[1] gain is of worth, when
anyone that has a fast enough machine to be compiling from source
quickly, doesn't really need to worry about the supposed[1] increase in
the first place...

-- Thomas Adam

[1] Yes, it really _is_ supposed.

-- 
I know nothing, and understand even less.




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