[aklug] Re: May the source be with you

From: Shane Spencer <shane@bogomip.com>
Date: Mon Aug 31 2009 - 09:14:05 AKDT

Woot. Optimization is good, that's for sure. There has been a lot of
pressure to get other distributions up to i686 optimizations at the
least, however they can't easily do it for quite a few very valid
reasons.

1.) They don't have the manpower. Like in the case of Debian they are
too dang busy packaging and testing software and making everything
nice and pretty for us Debian folk that they don't have the time to
test sub-archs as well as all the archs they currently support. The
software base is gigantic and without appropriate manpower they could
not make upgrades to vital software on all sub-archs without the
cooperating of all sub-arch groups. Instead they will inevitably end
up with one sub-arch being more up to date than the other.

2.) Binary space on package servers. Mirror network restrictions, etc...

3.) Testing the binaries requires actual hardware to be available.
The bleeding edge intel multi-million core sub-arch pool would only be
updated by commercial hardware vendors like HP and Intel.

Gentoo is nice, but I'm never going to review the source that is
distributed and I haven't gained enough trust in the distributors of
the source packages to use it on secured systems. I like the idea of
peer review of changes, GPG signed packages, and the overall web of
trust that Debian packaging is built on top of.

If I were to get fancy and start using Gentoo on my systems, I would
instantly because a master of backup/restore solutions. Primarily to
help with reinstall times of production equipment that became
compromised. I can get most servers reinstalled within around 30
minutes if the backups aren't up to snuff enough to be used for
complete system restore. Granted, I should be using a full-system
backup for immediate recovery anyways. But a source based optimized
distro would force that sort of procedure into me quickly. :)

Anyways, just my few bits on Gentoo/Slack and the like. Each distro
has it's gotchas.

- Shane

On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 11:48 PM, Christopher Howard<choward@indicium.us> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Now I've switched both my laptop and desktop PC over to Gentoo. Some of
> my coworkers and relatives think I'm a nut case because of my recent
> fascination with optimization. But it sure is a lot of fun to be able to
> customize and tweak everything so easily.
>
> You guys should be proud of me: I converted my system over from Debian
> to Gentoo without redoing the hard disk encryption, altering the RAID
> configuration, destroying my LVM, or having to move any of my personal
> documents. Figuring out the mdadm stuff (i.e., how to detect and remount
> the RAID) was the hardest part, but it went well and was a lot of fun.
>
> - --
> Christopher Howard
> http://indicium.us
> http://theologia.indicium.us
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Received on Mon Aug 31 09:14:17 2009

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