[ltp] Gentoo

[Thomas de Grenier de Latour]

I'm also an enthusiast gentoo user (for about 18 months now). I've used
several other distributions before gentoo, including debian, redhat,
mandrake and slackware, during at least 6 months for each
of them. Here are some pieces of my opinion about gentoo in
no particular order:

 - no, the main point of gentoo is not optimisation. For me, the
ability to tweak cflags is only a side effect of its "source based"
nature, but I only do it for some particular packages that really need
it, as it can be done in binary distribution (using apt-build, etc.).

 - yes, USE flags are amazing, and I hardly imagine going back to a
package system where the developers choose for me what are the features
I want or don't want in a given application. It's this freedom
which really implies installation from sources. 

 - yes, portage is a good packages manager. When you want to install
something, all you have to do is to tell him "install something" and it
takes care of dependencies, etc. Like apt-get, or urpmi? Yes. Nothing
more, nothing less, it does the job.

 - no, compilation is not time consuming. Sure, mozilla installation
will take 30 minutes (download included) on my T40 whereas it could have
only took 5 or 10 with a binary distribution. And what, who cares? I can
work, while it is compiling (portage has a "nice level" option), even
browse the web using the previously installed version of mozilla. I can
even sleep if it is really long (openoffice or kde are good examples).
Are there really "real life" situations where you need your kde updated
before the next 10 minutes? Are there "real life" situations where you
suddenly receive an OOo document you absolutly need to open, but, too
bad, you've never thought before that you might need this application so
you've not installed it yet? Ok, this can happen for small utilities,
the one you don't think of during your initial install, but this ones
are fast to compile, in worst case they will take about as long as the
source downloading. Again, who cares?

 - yes, the ebuild repository system, with it's continuous flow of new
packages and updates, is a good thing. I've never been convinced by
"snapshot" distributions: software is not wine, there is no benefice to
wait six months before installing a version that fix bugs or add
features. The "few days to few weeks" testing phase of gentoo package is
enough to have the same quality as in any other distribution, and this
system also has the benefit that there is never "big update day" where
you reinstall the full distribution. But for people who prefer never
upgrading anything but in case of security bug, it is also possible.
Again, you're free.

 - no, gentoo is not only about packages management. There are many
other good aspects. For instance, the init system is the first
reasonnable one I've ever seen under linux: it is based on dependency
and not on magic symlink numbering, it supports an arbitrary number of
runlevels, etc. A great piece of scripting, and really a pleasure for an
administrator. Configuration in general is well thought on gentoo, with
cool tools like java-config to switch the system between all installed
jvm, or dispatch-conf to update config files when you update some
package and keep some backups in an RCS repository, and many many
others. Really, gentoo is not just a collection of ./configure options
for various programs, it is a real distribution.

 - documentation is good in general. 

 - the gentoo community is the most opened and friendly I've ever seen.
This might not be objective, and might be because it is still young, but
that's really my felling and has to be one of my good points for gentoo.



On Tue, 7 Oct 2003 18:31:19 +0200 (MEST)
Ramon Casellas <casellas@infres.enst.fr> wrote:

> thanks for reading and sorry I bored you

Same here. It seems that gentooers are quite talkative.

-- 
TGL.