[Sussex] Online with Ubuntu

[Geoffrey Teale]

On Tue, 2005-02-08 at 11:58 +0000, Thomas Adam wrote: system.
> Oh really?  I have viewed Gentoo's "emerge" as nothing more than a
> wrapper around "apt-get source / apt-get -b build dep".  

I've built packages for gentoo, arch, fedora and my day job involves
creating Debian packages (originally on Debian, but now on Ubuntu).
You're way off - firstly, at a technical level it doesn't use any of
Debian's package management software.

Secondly for the apt system to do the same thing as emerge you'd have to
hand hack every package to use your customised flags.  The Gentoo
packaging system is significantly less complex that the Debian system
(which is frankly far more complex than it ever needed to be) and
significantly more powerful when dealing with compilation from source.

I have nothing against .deb, it is still a powerful and useful package
system, but to claim that emerge and portage is somehow just a
derivative of it is ludicrous.

> Indeed, if one
> really wanted to, one could do this process under Debian for most (if
> not all) packages.

Yes, but see above.  Doing it on debian would be as much work as doing
LFS if not more.  Just because you can do something with Debian it
doesn't make it the best choice for it.  Similarly I wouldn't advocate
using Gentoo to build hundreds of boxes or manage a corporate network.

Horses for courses - seeing Debian as the answer to every question is at
best naive.

> 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...

*suppossed* - Thomas, explain to me what you think is *supposed* about
the performance differences of compiling for a specific CPU architecture
rather than taking a generic i386 instruction set a-la Debian.

Ever wonder why chip manufacturers bother to create things like MMX or
3Dnow?  

Care to read the GCC manual?

Now I'll admit the vast majority of Gentoo users have no real idea what
any of those flags mean, and are probably fooling themselves, but in
skilled hands a system compiled from scratch with the right flags can
have significant performance gains against the same box.

I'm not a Gentoo zealot, almost all my boxes run Ubuntu (which is
derived from Debian) - I haven't run Gentoo for quite some time now,
because of the very good point you make (the compile time wasn't worth
it in the context of what I needed to do) but really the performance
gains can be very real, whether they are really worth while depends on
the user and the usage.

> -- Thomas Adam
> 
> [1] Yes, it really _is_ supposed.

Evidence please...

-- 
Geoffrey Teale <gteale at cmedltd.com>
Cmed Technology