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Linux Qs: What is the advantage of compiling yourself?
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Nothinman
Elite Member
Writing BSD licensed implementations of OSPF, BGP and NTP makes sense, but CVS sucks so if you're going to write a new versioning tool why not start over completely and implement somthing better?
They're codenames, the releases have real numbers (i.e. sarge was 3.1) and can also be referred to as oldstable, stable, testing and unstable if you like.
NewBlackDak
Senior member
No fool
Postfix can use hardened, ipv6, ldap, mailwrapper, mbox, mysql, nis, pam, postgres, sasl, selinux, ssl, vda
With prebuilt packages you get everything, or only what the maintainer deems as important.
If I want postfix installed with only pam, vda, and ldap suppord it takes one command
USE="-hardened -ipv6 ldap -mailwrapper -mbox -mysql -nis pam -postgres -sasl -selinux -ssl -vda" emerge postfix
If I want it hardened I take the "-" away from the front of hardened. You can't do that with pre-built binaries unless they have one for every combination of useflag possible.
Why do thing always turn into debian vs gentoo? I didn't say debian was bad, but I prefer portage, and it's ultimate customizability. If the deb maintiners compile KDE with arts compiled in you have no choice but to install arts.
sebastienmaass
Member
Are Gentoo & Slackware only LiveCDs? What about Fedora or Debian? Also can you upgrade from version to version automatically withing the OS or do you have to download and reinstall it?
Because relearning the tools would be a PITA. Because they have over 10 years worth of code already in CVS.
They plan on expanding on it once it's production ready, but first they just wanted a seamless transition from the current steaming pile they're using.
BTW I'm pretty sure they did test out subversion, openpm(?), and a couple of others. None of them could handle the load gracefully.
It just makes more sense to me to call it by something recognizable by someone that isn't intimately familiar with Debian.
Nothinman
Elite Member
And the same thing can be done with Debian, look at the make-jpkg tool for example.
And yet you are forced to have a compiler and all the development libraries installed on your system, so it's that much easier for an attacker to compile his exploits once he gets in.
Extracting FF from a .deb takes like 5s on my machine so there's virtually no time where the new one isn't installed 100%, that's not the point. Once the new FF is installed, 1% or 100%, the XUL files on disk won't mesh with the ones you have in memory and FF will have problems.
And Debian doesn't do the /lib32 thing because it's a hack, they'd rather take their time and do it right. 32-bit chroots work fine right now even if they waste some space.
Then the defaults should be inverted, having the "break my dependency tree without warning" option being the default is just plain stupid.
So you actually had to fix your package manager yourself?
I know what you meant, but 99% of the time it's f'ing worthless to jump through those hoops. And if you're really dead set on compiling things from scratch you can use 'apt-get source' and build it yourself.
Once the BitKeeper license was pulled from the kernel Linus and his people wrote and switched to git extremely quickly. He even imported the entire bk history into his git tree. It's not quite 10 years because they weren't using bk that long, but it's still a huge amount of changelog entries.
That's one of the reasons Linus created git, the current tools out there couldn't deal with the history and usage patterns of the Linux kernel devs.
RedHat users understand rawhide, Debian users understand sid or unstable, BSD users understand -CURRENT, etc. There's no universal term.
Everyone involved with the kernel is using git now? We're talking every developer with commit privs. Plus users who want to download the latest and greatest.
OpenBSD has like 10 years and 4 months worth of source, and I think I read the source is around 300MB these days (not sure if that includes X and the ports tree). I'm not really sure how CVS handles branches/tags, but there is one for every release (netbsd 1.1-openbsd 3.8), and several smaller branches (UBC) throughout. So that's almost 10.5 years of a LOT of source, and who knows how many years of familiarity with CVS. ~22 CVS mirrors, not to mention branches individual developers have on their own machines or even mirrors users setup for themselves.
The OpenBSD devs know CVS. They've been using it for a while. They didn't like the security issues, so they decided to write a drop in replacement. Once it gets to that point they have mentioned wanting to add features.
[L=Short interview with one of the gentlement working on OpenCVS]http://nedbsd.nl/modules/static/page/JorisVinkInterview/L]
Unstable, testing, and stable make more sense than sid. I don't care about universal terms, just something that can give you an idea of what's going on without having to look it up every time.
It's incredible how much performance difference people report between Firefox security updates that don't have any changes that changed performance in the real performance tests.
WTF? Are they disabling the XUL cache (really really really really really stupid), or linking the eventual binary back to the build directory (somewhat stupid)?
sid = Still In Development, doesn't it?
What's stupid about setting your own CFLAGS is that you can't possibly be as familiar with the package as its maintainers - sure, for some apps -O3 might help, but for others it may not, and the people maintaining binary packages have probably figured that out already and picked the best flags.
Any argument that you can remove more unwanted features with gentoo is moronic because you're burning much more space with source code + source deps than you'd waste with a slightly more feature-full binary, and more time in the compile than you'll lose by any minor performance difference over the next decade.
sourceninja
Diamond Member
"Any argument that you can remove more unwanted features with gentoo is moronic because you're burning much more space with source code + source deps than you'd waste with a slightly more feature-full binary, and more time in the compile than you'll lose by any minor performance difference over the next decade."
But would you argue that not having some features is more secure?
But would you argue that not having some features is more secure?
Nothinman
Elite Member
No users have commit priviledges because there's no central repository, Linus has his own personal tree on kernel.org and he pulls changes from other people's trees into his own. When someone has a patch they want included they say "Pull from this git tree, here's what's changed". Some people still use old style patches in email, but just about all of the main developers have git trees setup now. And you don't need to use git to track the latest and greatest, daily snapshots are put on kernel.org that can be retrieved via ftp but using git is better because it saves bandwidth and would be faster.
Pretty much all of that applies to Linux as well, except of course there's no userland code, but all of them seem to have coped well enough. And just FYI, I looked and a fresly extracted 2.6.14.3 kernel is 244M.
Couldn't tell you, I don't use FF very often so I never investigated. But what happens is after an update certain things break and I get XUL errors, so I assumed it was because some of the XUL on disk changed.
Actually it's the name of the kid in toy story that's always breaking his toys, but I think still in development was mentioned after the fact.
Any security you get by removing features is undone by giving the attacker a compiler and all of the headers, archives for linking, etc.
sourceninja
Diamond Member
"Any security you get by removing features is undone by giving the attacker a compiler and all of the headers, archives for linking, etc."
Which is the first things I install on any linux box I build anyways because I develop software. But not having the library can decrease the number of possible ways for the attacker to get in.
Which is the first things I install on any linux box I build anyways because I develop software. But not having the library can decrease the number of possible ways for the attacker to get in.
NewBlackDak
Senior member
I hate to break it to you, but once someone is actually on the machine it doesn't matter if you have a compiler or not. If they have full control they can install their own compiler.
If you use linux, and have never had to compile anything(be it a driver, the kernel, or an app that is missing from your package management system) then you proably should be using widnows anyway.
Examples:
I don't want the default kernel with every module known to man. I want my own monolithic kernel custom-tailored with only the things needed to run my hardware. Again that leaves fewer places of attack. You need a compiler to do that.
With the postfix again. If there is an ssl exploit, and I don't have ssl compiled in to postfix then I don't have to worry about that exploit. Why is that hard to understand?
Not having what you don't need is a small step in the direction of security.
If you use linux, and have never had to compile anything(be it a driver, the kernel, or an app that is missing from your package management system) then you proably should be using widnows anyway.
Examples:
I don't want the default kernel with every module known to man. I want my own monolithic kernel custom-tailored with only the things needed to run my hardware. Again that leaves fewer places of attack. You need a compiler to do that.
With the postfix again. If there is an ssl exploit, and I don't have ssl compiled in to postfix then I don't have to worry about that exploit. Why is that hard to understand?
Not having what you don't need is a small step in the direction of security.
Nothinman
Elite Member
Probably. But, given that most of the attacks are done by script kiddies, if you can make it so their exploits won't compile they'll probably move on to an easier target. Is that a good policy? Not really, but you should do everything in your power to make their life difficult and IMO not giving them a compiler is a much bigger piece of that puzzle than removing LDAP support from postfix.
Not true, packages are provided for pretty much everything you can think of, including things like the fglrx and nvidia drivers.
Pointless. Even if you remove kernel module support an attacker can mess with /dev/kmem and do whatever they want. Fedora has some patches that restrict /dev/kmem usage, but I doubt your custom kernel includes those patches. All you're doing is making life more difficult on yourself because when you buy a new NIC or plug in a USB hard disk with an odd filesytem on it you won't have the driver available without compiling it.
And without SSL support everything is out in plain-text anyway so an attacker might as well concentrate on intercepting a username and password instead.
Yes, but you're giving too much credit to the wrong things.
silverpig
Lifer
I was just saying that you don't have to sit there and wait on end for your programs to install...
-D is --deep. I don't believe there is a short version for --depclean has a short version
--depclean
Determines all packages installed on the system that have no
explicit reason for being there. emerge generates a list of
packages which it expects to be installed by checking the system
package list and the world file. It then compares that list to
the list of packages which are actually installed; the differ-
ences are listed as unnecessary packages and then unmerged after
a short timeout.
It's not the same idea. In ubuntu/debian when you install xmms it has support for alsa, oss, arts, esd, etc all built in. ie, if you have arts installed, you can open up xmms and set its output plugin to arts. This is installing xmms with arts support. It doesn't mean that arts is installed alongside xmms, it just means that xmms can use arts if it is available.
In gentoo, you have to set a USE variable to tell portage to build xmms with arts support. Having this option of compiling support in has 2 nice benefits, one gentoo-specific, and one that would be good to have with every distro.
The gentoo-specific benefit is that if you have -arts set as a USE variable, any package that normally comes with arts support is compiled without it. This way, you don't have to install arts to have the source code there so you can use it to build xmms. Basically, it kills off a ton of dependencies if you decide that you don't want to have to be dependent on them.
The more general benefit is (continuing with my specific example... seems funny, but just for argument's sake here...), let's say that there is a security issue with the arts plugin for xmms. Until a patch is sent out, debian users have to uninstall xmms from their systems in order to be secure. Gentoo users can just set -arts and recompile xmms.
There are plenty of ebuilds in portage. I'm pretty sure there are more in portage than there are in apt. QA? There's stable, ~ and -.
The ebuild is just an install script. They don't break licenses. Stick your game cd in and type emerge <whatever>. It'll install the game for you.
Opera (which is free for download btw), texmaker, mplayer, installers for a lot of 3rd party licensed software... a bunch of other stuff. Why is automatix so popular with ubuntu even with universe and multiverse enabled? Gnomebaker... that's just the stuff I remember trying to find and not being able to.
Nothinman
Elite Member
But if it's anything more than a small util, you do.
As I said, I don't have a Gentoo box to verify what you're talking about on, which I'm proud of.
Which is the opposite of what I'm talking about. If you 'emerge -u qt' (or whatever the QT package is called) it'll remove it without warning and break all of KDE because no real dependency checking is done, that's what I'm talking about.
So? If it's a real problem file a bug and the maintainer will seperate the ARTS package out. AFAICT xmms doesn't depend on anything ARTS related, so what do I care? A bigger problem is that xmms is done in GTK and as such pulls in all kiinds of GTK 1.2 plus all of it's crap.
And if you decide to switch to Gnome later on you have to recompile half your packages, yay.
And if there is a security problem with 'ls' you'll have to worry about the latest update to coreutils, and there's not much you can do about that. If you're worrying about whether you have ARTS, esd, ALSA, etc support you're worrying too much and need to get out of the house more often. Chances are more likely that ARTS is the least of your problems.
Packages.gentoo.org says 10678 which is still pretty far behind Debian sid which is almost ready to hit 18,000. And I know a few people have have gone from Gentoo -> Debian because the packages are more consistent and just of general better quality.
Sure they can break licenses, and unless you read the license and understand it 100% you can't claim otherwise.
Irrelevant, downloading it for personal use and redistributing it with a product (i.e. Gentoo) are seperate things and last I checked redistributing it required an agreement with Opera.
Because people don't know any better, up until very recently Automatix forced a lot of package installations which had the possibility of breaking a lot of other things LordHunter317 berrated the author of Automatix into removing the force options but, personally, I still wouldn't trust it.
silverpig
Lifer
Define waiting around. A few minutes isn't a big deal. Even something like thunderbird only takes a few. And if you REALLY need something big quickly, then there are binary versions available. Openoffice just took me 1m45s to install...
You're not quite getting it. First, arts is a kde thing, but I'm sure you know that. settinge USE="-arts" will prevent the dependencies of arts from needing to be installed just so you can build xmms. However, if you did build with USE="arts" enabled, used kde, and then switched to gnome, you wouldn't have to rebuild xmms. Just keep using it. Use esd if you want, provided that you compiled xmms with esd in the first place. Or alsa. Or oss. The key here is that you don't have to build all the dependencies of a package if you don't want to, provided that you tell portage that you're not going to use them. If you did set -gnome -gtk initially, and then want to use gnome later, and have gnome support for everything, then just change your use variables to "gnome gtk" and then do an emerge -e -newuse world before going to bed.
Sure they can break licenses, and unless you read the license and understand it 100% you can't claim otherwise.
The opera licence is linked to on the packages.gentoo.org site's description of the package. It forbids selling, renting, leasing, or sublicensing.
Or maybe because the way ubuntu/debian is set up right now doesn't provide for a lot of users' needs? I'm not saying it's bad; they're fine distros. I had ubuntu installed on my own rig and use debian at school. Gentoo works better for me, and distros that are compiled from source have certain advantages. Sure, there are disadvantages too, but that scale will tip differently for different people.
Nothinman
Elite Member
Your definition of a few minutes must not be the same as mine, I just built mozilla-thunderbird and it took 63m18.082s here.
I get it, I just think it's a pointless optimization and the only real benefit is a few K of disk space and maybe some VM space in the process that loads and doesn't use the library.
It would be safer to assume that you're not in compliance and don't touch the software if you don't understand the license.
Their site also says you have to register and agree to the terms in the multiple distribution agreement before you can distribute Opera.
Not that I agree, but if that's true then people should be working with Ubuntu to fix the problems instead of writing tools that work against the system to wedge software into it.
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