Re: [tlug] [OT] plonk [Re: Classes]

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Chris Worthington writes:

 > A lot of users at the last tech meeting kept touting Gentoo.

I wouldn't say that; only that a couple said they like it.  But my
impression was that most of those who say they like it have special
reasons for preferring Gentoo, and do not necessarily advocate it over
any other distro for general use.

 > I've only used Gentoo a couple times. The one reason why I like
 > Debian based distros is I really like using apt-get for
 > packages. Maybe someone can explain what they like about Gentoo?

I don't find use of emerge much more taxing than apt-get.  YMMV, of
course.

What do I like about it?  Gentoo builds each package from scratch.
That means that with a few exceptions, each new build should
correspond to the code you have on your system.  This can help avoid
problems, and allows you to use newer versions of each package.
Although normally emerge does remove the source, you can keep the
source with a single option.  This is sometimes useful even to
non-developers because there is often documentation (FAQs, random
text-file notes, and even extensive comments in the sources) that is
not provided by the package.

It can also create new problems, of course, if you update a package
that others depend on, and it changes in a backward incompatible way.
However, you can usually solve such issues with revdep-rebuild (which
is the program that rebuilds packages based on reversed dependencies;
ie, when a new package is installed, the packages that depend on it
are rebuilt by revdep-rebuild).

I find that this generally keeps packages somewhat more up-to-date and
consistent than binary-based distros (although currently my only
system with a binary distro is running Debian testing, so I really
have little experience with how up-to-date modern user-oriented binary
distros are).

Gentoo also provides a very flexible system for configuring your
packages, the USE flags.  This often allows you to build smaller
binaries and install fewer packages, by leaving out features that you
don't want.  Fewer preqrequisites also means fewer cases where a
library you never call breaks your system.

If you have a server, you may also prefer to have as little software
installed on it as possible, and binary package distros tend to be
somewhat bloated.  OTOH, if you're that paranoid, you probably don't
want a C compiler on your server, so you're going to be using binary
packages anyway.  Gentoo does permit building binary packages, but
doing those on a development host either requires a host with the same
CPU etc as the target server, or you're into the same kind of issues
that cross-compiling has.

If none of that sounds like You Are Gonna Need It, then Gentoo
probably isn't better for you than Debian or Ubuntu, and it will
definitely be much slower to install/upgrade many large packages such
as Firefox or OOo.