Maciel: Because your distro should be cool [LWN.net]

Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 25, 2011 17:40 UTC (Tue) by cjwatson (subscriber, #7322)
In reply to: Maciel: Because your distro should be cool by sturmflut
Parent article: Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Gentoo's approach of "don't even mark your ebuild ~arch unless you've tried it on a Gentoo system of that architecture" makes that last problem very likely. Debian and derivatives take the opposite approach: try to build it for everything unless somebody says otherwise.

Some software is non-portable, sure, and yes you do run across the odd thing that fails at runtime on certain architectures, but it's not quite as bad as all that. I'm much happier to defend Debian's choice of sides in this tradeoff than I would be to defend Gentoo's, which seems to involve an awful lot of manual wheel-spinning.

(Of course, maybe I'm wrong about how much is manual. My only substantive experience of Gentoo development is getting a libpipeline ebuild into the portage tree - four weeks later nobody's turned it on for anything other than ~x86 and ~amd64. Maybe I should be doing something but it's not clear what's best ...)

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Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 25, 2011 18:48 UTC (Tue) by gidoca (subscriber, #62438) [Link]

You can't really compare Debian and Gentoo that way: if an ebuild is committed without being tested, it may not even build. Debian packages on the other hand won't make it into the repository if they fail to build.

Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 25, 2011 20:18 UTC (Tue) by cjwatson (subscriber, #7322) [Link]

I'm well aware of that - but Gentoo does seem to err too far on the side of not trying a lot of the time.

Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 25, 2011 22:12 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

I agree with this. I'm not using gentoo at the moment, but when I was using it I dan into more than one case where a perl program was only marked for x86, not for amd64 and when I pushed about it I was told that it wasn't enabled because it hadn't had anyone test it there and report that it worked. I reported that it did work, but months later it still hadn't gotten blessed for amd64 (let alone for other architectures)

yes you do have apps that have problems with different word sized and byte orders, but even then, one you know that it works on 32 bit little endian systems, you should be able to have a pretty good confidence that it will work on _all_ 32 bit little endian system (as long as the compile step doesn't barf)