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SubjectRe: Distributions vs kernel development
On Wed, 19 May 2004, Rob Landley wrote:

>
> It's not really a distro. It's an enormous HOWTO. (Then again, so's Gentoo,
> but gentoo does claim to be a distro, which is where I get disappointed...)
>

No less a distribution than, say, Debian. You just type 'emerge' rather
than 'apt-get' and get source tarballs rather than binary packages.

>
> And then there's gentoo, which has a python script talk to a server out on the
> net to figure out what to build. If you're going to even TRIGGER that, you
> need to be familiar with their packaging tool. To take it apart and modify
> the build would take a lot of eyeballing.
>

Not quite; ebuilds are all on-disk. The only time you talk to a server is
to update the on-disk ebuild tree (via rsync) or download a source
tarball. Pretty much the same way BSD ports works. Taking apart and
modifying the build is pretty trivial thanks to the ebuild(1) tool and the
fact that ebuilds are in bash with Portage extensions.

>
> Suppose they don't select OpenSSL because they go "this is a desktop system,
> not a server", and then they realise later "oh, I need https:// support in
> Konqueror/Mozilla"...
>

Gentoo solves this problem with USE flags by providing a reasonable
default set and letting users fine-tune the support they want prior to
building the system.

>
> You keep saying that installing from source is better, but it seems to be from
> "gee, wouldn't it be nice if" land rather than due to actual experience. You
> _can_ build and install an SRPM into a Red Hat system. It's too much of a
> pain to be worth it to me, but it's been an option for years and years.
>

The advantage, in my view, of compiling from source consistently is that
you (a) eliminate any potential bugs from the build system being
drastically different from the target system and (b) have the flexibility
of being able to fine-tune dependencies and build time configuration.
Where's the RPM package for Mozilla with encryption, without debugging,
with gtk2, with ipv6, without ldap, without the calendar, with mail,
without IRC, and without XFT? How about GCC with gcj, without f77, without
nls, with objc?

It's certainly not for everybody, but to me that's the most important
aspect of always compiling from source.
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