[Sussex] Online with Ubuntu

[Thomas Adam]

On Tue, Feb 08, 2005 at 12:18:35PM +0000, Geoffrey Teale wrote:
> 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.

In principal only.  Not *actually* dervived.  Sorry if I implied
otherwise.

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

Ah, I did not claim that to be the case -- but it is also interesting
how there are *so* many Debian derivatives, is it not?  Of course Debian
is not the answer to everything.

> *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.

There is a slight increase in performance, but nothing blazingly so that
would make one sit up and say "wow! That's really fast".  Really there
isn't.  I've used Gentoo on several occasions here, and to be honest, I
saw (felt?) no difference in using an optimised compiled program, to
that of Debian's i386 one.

But again, if one has a fast enough computer, the gain from using a
compiled program that is optimised to the processor isn't going to be
felt.

You may well come back to me with interesting comparisons using "time"
to show how quickly that application executed, etc., but so what?
That's not going to affect the overall performance.  That's just a
measure of execution, and not really of useability.

Oh, and these are opinions only...  [1] :)

-- Thomas Adam

<dpkg> | [gentooitis] a mental disorder which causes the sufferer to
feel a constant craving for ever-higher version numbers, despite any
warnings of bugs, problems, incompatibilities or other obstacles to
productivity.  Sufferers will often spend hours or days recompiling
perfectly good packages for no benefit.  Other symptoms include the use
of mysql in place of ordinary text files, or the use of XML in any
context whatsoever [2].

[2]  Yes, this is to be taken light-heartedly.

-- 
I know nothing, and understand even less.