Gentoo Linux - Long @$$ complile times?!?

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey

Originally posted by: decode

So you like control. You like compiling from source. But you don't like a system that helps you do that more easily?

Didn't you see the part where he called portage a great package management system?

I think he was referring to the "Dumb idea" comment followed by the "I swear by compiling" comment, which I too found a bit confusing.
The idea behind a source based distro such as Gentoo is of course to compile things, and Portage makes this easier, so I don't quite understand what the problem is?

Like chsh1ca I don't compile stuff for speed(in fact in many situations I don't compile stuff if I can avoid it), but in the cases where I do, it's for control, I just don't see why it's "A dumb idea" to have a system(Portage) that makes this easier for me.
Running ./configure && make && make install with a bunch of options, finding out Im missing some library, doing the same for that, etc etc isn't my idea of fun, Portage helps me avoid this while at the same time allowing me good control.

To me, Portage merely removes the parts of compiling stuff that I considder nothing more than a PITA.

I'd never dream of installing Gentoo on a Celery 300 though, Im fairly patient, but not THAT patient

 

[drag]

Don't forget that many things are actually VERY hard to get compiled and working.

Like the latest version of GCC, or X. Very compicated installs with lots of options and lots and lots of patches. Other packages are a pain in the arse because unless you do it "just so" they won't work at all. Other ones don't follow the ./configure && make && make install standard and/or have make files that require manually editing or extensive ./configure options to get the features that you want.

Thats why portage is cool, because it works. It makes it easy.

Another cool thing about Gentoo is how it embraces the newest and best features aviable to linux. They do things that nobody else does, and do it well. The guy incharge of Gentoo is on top of things.

You can bet that you will see the first realy usable distro based on the LKM security modules, the first pure x86-64-based code distro, and a bunch of other stuff.

What sucks about Gentoo is that you need to have a fast machine, or you go insane. Portage isn't fully mature and will break itself if you try to keep a install going thru 2 or 3 revisions. The package developers are not as "professional" or experianced as Debian's (they will be eventually, Debian has just been around forever).

The biggest issue is that there are realy no "stable" and "unstable" stuff. You are always going to be using the latest and greatest. Pushed by the package mantainer's appitite for having the newest features. Which is good for a home user enthusiast, but sucks for when you need to depend on the OS and don't have time to spend of fixing and experimenting with different package versions....

 

[Sunner]

Very good summary drag, my thoughts exactly.

I wonder for example if there's a single distro out there except for Gentoo which makes a netinstall on an nForce2 mobo a breeze?
Making nVidia's display drivers work with 2.6?

 

[Praetor]

Wow. I leave y'all alone for a few days and you go on a Gentoo bash-fest.

I was installing Gentoo in a VMWare window just for shits and giggles, I was trying to figure out exactly what step I was missing when I was compiling it on my other drive. And along the way, I decided to run the afore mentioned emerge command to compile everything from scratch. WHICH, as someone pointed out (I'm too lazy to scroll down ) would take forever. No biggie, I wasn't really worried about it.

I've read most of the same reports y'all have read regarding the lack of significant performance increase in Gentoo when using it's optimized flags. IMHO, I think it's a little dangerous for some programs to have these optimize flags, well, flagged. It can break or cause issues some compiles if you have them enabled.

I chose Gentoo just so I could say I tried it out. I had my LFS system built and running X/KDE perfectly fine, but I wanted to see what I was missing. Maybe I'll d/l debian later on, just to satisfy you monkies.

 

[decode]

Originally posted by: drag
The biggest issue is that there are realy no "stable" and "unstable" stuff. You are always going to be using the latest and greatest. Pushed by the package mantainer's appitite for having the newest features. Which is good for a home user enthusiast, but sucks for when you need to depend on the OS and don't have time to spend of fixing and experimenting with different package versions....

To quote from /etc/make.conf:

Taken from: /etc/make.conf
# Advanced Masking
# ================
#
# Gentoo is using a new masking system to allow for easier stability testing
# on packages. KEYWORDS are used in ebuilds to mask and unmask packages based
# on the platform they are set for. A special form has been added that
# indicates packages and revisions that are expected to work, but have not yet
# been approved for the stable set. '~arch' is a superset of 'arch' which
# includes the unstable, in testing, packages. Users of the 'x86' architecture
# would add '~x86' to ACCEPT_KEYWORDS to enable unstable/testing packages.
# '~ppc', '~sparc', '~sparc64' are the unstable KEYWORDS for their respective
# platforms. DO NOT PUT ANYTHING BUT YOUR SPECIFIC ~ARCHITECTURE IN THE LIST.
# IF YOU ARE UNSURE OF YOUR ARCH, OR THE IMPLICATIONS, DO NOT MODIFY THIS.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: decode

Originally posted by: drag
The biggest issue is that there are realy no "stable" and "unstable" stuff. You are always going to be using the latest and greatest. Pushed by the package mantainer's appitite for having the newest features. Which is good for a home user enthusiast, but sucks for when you need to depend on the OS and don't have time to spend of fixing and experimenting with different package versions....

To quote from /etc/make.conf:

Taken from: /etc/make.conf
# Advanced Masking
# ================
#
# Gentoo is using a new masking system to allow for easier stability testing
# on packages. KEYWORDS are used in ebuilds to mask and unmask packages based
# on the platform they are set for. A special form has been added that
# indicates packages and revisions that are expected to work, but have not yet
# been approved for the stable set. '~arch' is a superset of 'arch' which
# includes the unstable, in testing, packages. Users of the 'x86' architecture
# would add '~x86' to ACCEPT_KEYWORDS to enable unstable/testing packages.
# '~ppc', '~sparc', '~sparc64' are the unstable KEYWORDS for their respective
# platforms. DO NOT PUT ANYTHING BUT YOUR SPECIFIC ~ARCHITECTURE IN THE LIST.
# IF YOU ARE UNSURE OF YOUR ARCH, OR THE IMPLICATIONS, DO NOT MODIFY THIS.

Still, that's nowhere near Debian/Stable, it's more like sid, while ~x86(or whatever arch) is more like...don't know, -CVS ?

 

[GTaudiophile]

I'll be replacing Slackware with Gentoo over the upcoming holiday. It'll be going on a PII-450 box. Should be interesting...

(BTW, all my friends use it.)

 

[silverpig]

I love gentoo. It took me only 8 hours to do a full stage 1 install on my XP 2500@3200. This included X and gnome. I spent the next day setting up all my hardware (except sound... that took a few days longer and still is only mostly working). It has some great points:

1. You have full control over everything that comes into your system. Granted you do with other distros, but I found that at least mandrake and redhat installed a lot I didn't know about.
2. emerge is just awesome
3. the gentoo forums are a great resource (2nd to AT of course ). I've gotten a lot of help there just from browsing the forums. If you have a problem chances are that others have too and you can find the solution there. If not, then you can make a post and your question will be answered. It's just like here, but software oriented instead of hardware.
3.5 l33tn355

 

[drag]

umm...

 

[drag]

Grrr.. mispost.

 

[Vadatajs]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
<obligatory debian troll>

wow, just like 1999 again

debian == out of date

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Vadatajs

Originally posted by: Nothinman
<obligatory debian troll>

wow, just like 1999 again

debian == out of date

Out of date, or well tested?

 

[Nothinman]

wow, just like 1999 again

Thunderbird 0.4 was out in 1999? Wow I must be way behind then.

 

[jhu]

i think linux from scratch is a better learning tool than gentoo

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

http://u-os.org/tokyo/

 

[drag]

The thing about debian stable is that it's reliable.

THink about this. As a debian unstable user or a Gentoo user some updates don't go as well as you'd like. They mess up or you get a bug in a package that takes special effort on your own to correct or you have to regress to a earlier version to get it working and wait until the package maintaner fixes the problem.

Now image you have to do that with 40-50 workstations?

Not fun.

What if your a developer or a linux user that just want something that works. 100% everything they use and know works is going to be working the same way months later, because they just got better things to do with their time then chase bugs.

With debian stable, if I was incharge of a bunch of workstations and needed to make sure that the security updates and major bugs get fixed on a timely basis. I know that I can write a simple script from my main workstation that will ssh into the workstations, execute a "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade" from my own private debian stable mirror (were I keep package updates that I did basic functional testing with), and put it on a cron job, say tuesday night.

Now when I come back wensday I know everything will work and am not going to get yelled at from breaking their favorite e-mail client, or ruining a proccessing intensive job that's been rcalculating for the past week or so.

 

[Nothinman]

Debian stable is definately too old for most workstations, noone denies that and most Debian users use sid or sarge on their workstations. sid if you don't mind fixing things once in a while (and I must stress that things rarely break in sid) and sarge if you don't mind waiting for the packages to be tested by the sid people for a little bit. stable is best used on servers where nothing should change, only security patches get pushed and even those are back-ported to the version in stable.