[ltp] Gentoo

[Ramon Casellas]

On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, Buchan Milne wrote:

>
> Which is pretty much what you get with a normal binary distro ...
>
> Regards,
> Buchan
>

Just my 0.02Eur...

I must admit that I first tried gentoo because I read about this whole
optimization thing... IIRC, I also did read somewhere that only glibc and
similar packages are worth optimizing (and *are* distributed as such by
major distros, like glibc-i686 etc) and that using strange optimization
flags may cause subtle bugs, e.g:

(no debugging symbols found)...(no debugging symbols found)...name of
display: :0.0
libGL: XF86DRIGetClientDriverName: 4.0.1 radeon (screen 0)
libGL: OpenDriver: trying /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri/radeon_dri.so
libGL: XF86DRIGetClientDriverName: 4.0.1 radeon (screen 0)
drmOpenByBusid: busid is PCI:1:0:0
drmOpenDevice: minor is 0
drmOpenDevice: node name is /dev/dri/card0
drmOpenDevice: open result is 6, (OK)
drmOpenByBusid: drmOpenMinor returns 6
drmOpenByBusid: drmGetBusid reports PCI:1:0:0

Program received signal SIGFPE, Arithmetic exception.
[Switching to Thread 16384 (LWP 12166)]
0x405a50db in _mesa_test_os_sse_exception_support ()
   from /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri/radeon_dri.so
....

So after living on the edge for a couple of months I decided to give up
this -fomit-instructions -fskip-function-calls -fput-noop-onstack
craziness and started using more stable optimization flags..

**however** I still use gentoo. Why ? I've been talking with some people
on gentoo forums, and most of them (including myself) keep on using gentoo
*because of package management/portage* and the ability to select
"capabilities" using USE flags, tunning your applications to use exactly
what you want to use, thus giving you a "little" more control on the
dependencies.

In summary, gentoo has strenghts and weaknesses (sometimes someone just
commits a weird package without having tested it before into the CVS and
this propagates but...), but it's about choice, and you are not compiling
***all the time*** (I mean, you don't compile OpenOffice/KDE/XFree etc
that often...)


I'll go to my corner now :) thanks for reading and sorry I bored you

Regards,
R.