No compilation, please?

Posted Jul 12, 2024 18:17 UTC (Fri) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118)
In reply to: No compilation, please? by atai
Parent article: Nix alternatives and spinoffs

> Really? Gentoo should have the same "problem" and unrelated to NixOS or derivatives

No, because Gentoo does not require rebuilding anything **as a consequence** of patching the libc or changing toolchain build flags.

As NYKevin says, when Gentoo _does_ require rebuilding things, it's because you deliberately chose to use a source-first distribution. Or you might choose to use Gentoo's binary cache, which is (unlike Nix's) not predicated on never touching or altering the dependencies of packages involved. So it's a feature (that you might or might not choose to use), not a problem.

Nix, on the other hand, will force you to rebuild the world exactly **as a consequence** of changing some definitions at the bottom of the dependency graph, even if it is not technically necessary.

No compilation, please?

Posted Jul 12, 2024 19:10 UTC (Fri) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link] (3 responses)

+1. I'll just add: I've been a satisfied Gentoo user for the last 18 years. Early on, yes, there was a good amount of world rebuilding needed. For production, this meant investing in creating temporary systems to handle the build and storage of binaries was worth it.

But, the times I've had to rebuild world all at once in the last 5 years has been zero. The work to create centralized binary caches at Gentoo HQ and making binary-only versions of some of the most brittle builds (major web browsers, office suites, multimedia players, etc.) has taken the pain out of everyday upgrades.

And, if you have a farm of dozens, hundreds or thousands of machines, you can easily create the infrastructure to reduce the pain of recompiling to a temporary build farm that creates a local binary cache, and distribute the built binaries to the fleet. Modern CPUs and ramdisks handle this task well.

Gentoo is a *metadistribtution*. This means that it can be used to create *your own distribution*. It has the tools to enable you to do so. With the care and attention, it can reward you greatly.

Let's not slag Gentoo reflexively when we want to just complain about inefficiency generally.

Cheers!

No compilation, please?

Posted Jul 12, 2024 19:59 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> But, the times I've had to rebuild world all at once in the last 5 years has been zero. The work to create centralized binary caches at Gentoo HQ and making binary-only versions of some of the most brittle builds (major web browsers, office suites, multimedia players, etc.) has taken the pain out of everyday upgrades.

You haven't upgraded your profile recently?

Mind you, that was the upgrade from 2017 to 2024, and it was also the upgrade where you were sort-of forced to merged-usr, and it was sort-of the upgrade where you felt pushed forward to get the distro into the third decade.

I think it was only my second profile upgrade in however many years (Istr the one before was 2014), and this upgrade the instructions did say "finish with 'emerge -e @world' " ie "rebuild everything", But how long have I been using gentoo? And this is the first time.

Cheers,
Wol

No compilation, please?

Posted Jul 12, 2024 21:45 UTC (Fri) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link] (1 responses)

Ah, yes, you're right, Wol - I did have to do that migration-related rebuild of world. I was able to skip the merged-usr, tho, with the "split-usr" profiles, as I'm using OpenRC. So, not zero. Once, across all my local systems. I do have distcc and other optimizations set up so it makes doing so less painful in terms of time.

No compilation, please?

Posted Jul 12, 2024 22:26 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I didn't go to merged-usr, because both my systems are reasonably recent, and systemd. So they were merged-usr from the start.

I went systemd for the same reason I chose gentoo - it's a deliberate choice of a learning curve. My old OpenRC system was just that - too old. I used to have distcc, but I just haven't got round to setting my new systems up the way I would like. I want to share the build directories over the network, and then I'd uprade the faster system (I build binary packages as a matter of course), and then upgrade the slower system with the "use packages if they're there" option.

Cheers,
Wol