My Gentoo odyssey (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

My Gentoo odyssey (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 19, 2006 21:20 UTC (Tue) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047)
Parent article: My Gentoo odyssey (Linux.com)

In general, I think the level of "useful work" to "configuring" you have to do is going to depend on, among other things, what you're used to. If you come from the Debian world, Gentoo still offers some advantages, but Debian has always been pretty good about "install and go". Some of us, however, have had to do more drastic things.

Pre-Gentoo, I used Red Hat, starting with Red Hat 5 and ending with RH9. Often, I found myself wanting a package that was not in the distro, and for which no RPMs had been built (or else they were for a different RPM distro, or the wrong version). So, I would download the source tarball, do the configure/make/make install dance, and build the package in /usr/local. In the case of "program" packages, this wasn't a huge issue, but what became very problematic was that I needed libraries that weren't packaged with Red Hat. Worse, on several occasions I needed a different version of GCC or glibc than the distro packaged. Distro updates were not a solution to this problem, either.

So, by the time I finally decided "enough is enough!" and jumped ship to Gentoo, I had spent several years maintaining a /usr/local that was almost its own distribution. I had built and installed a separate GCC and glibc version, compiled large numbers of libraries and programs with them, and managed (somehow) a separate ld.so.conf for the separate branches, with associated maintenance headaches. I had hand-built well over 20% of the software I used day to day.

Coming from that to Gentoo was like a dream. I could do what I wanted, i.e., select all the compile-time options for a package and make sure I had the right version, without having to deal with manually satisfying dependencies, much less maintaining a separate toolchain. The whole system would work together without undue effort on my part: just set the USE flags I want in make.conf, emerge the packages, and everything works. Even upgrades of GCC and glibc are painless.

So, at least in my case, using Gentoo has resulted in a lot LESS effort spent on maintaining the system, and a lot more "real work" getting done.

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Well, so it was wrong prev distro

Posted Sep 20, 2006 3:54 UTC (Wed) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

I guess when you were stuck with RH9 (and glibc/gcc upgrade issues were really unsolvable with updates), the problem was with not considering changing it *right away* when the phrase "sub-distro maintenance" might have struck you. If it was even earlier, then it was somewhat worse -- influencing RH seems to have been somewhat hard, and regarding glibc soname changes within N.x -- impossible.

Having somewhat artifical nightmare then is indeed guaranted to make you relief when you, as they say here, finally "sell the goat". :)

--
Mike,
ALT Linux Team member

Well, so it was wrong prev distro

Posted Sep 20, 2006 4:41 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

Certainly, although Gentoo does still have some major advantages, in that I can determine compile-time settings for a package without having to jump out of the package system. In my experience with Debian, if I want to do that, I can pull down the source DEB, but I have to manually build it. And updates aren't as transparent: if I want to keep those settings, I have to make sure I do the manual build of the updated package every time.

Although they may have changed it a bit since Woody.