Re: [gentoo-project] [RFC] Improvements to the About Gentoo page

On 2/23/11 1:39 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 2:08 AM, "Paweł Hajdan, Jr."
> <phajdan.jr@g.o> wrote:
>> Instead of custom patches (which most of people don't apply anyway I
>> think)
>
> Perhaps ok to drop, but you gotta admit that no other distro makes
> this as easy to do as Gentoo, without causing problems (beyond
> whatever your patches do).

Good point. Yeah, that's one of the things I like a lot in Gentoo.

>> and custom CFLAGS (easy way to hose the system)
>
> Yet probably 80% of our users use them, I'm guessing.  They also
> provide significant performance boosts, especially on x86 where half
> of the other distros still build everything for vanilla i386.  I think
> that pulling this out really does remove something that makes Gentoo
> distinctive.

Makes sense. On the other hand, we should avoid as much as possible
creating an impression of crazy racers who will compile things for hours
to squeeze out a few milliseconds.

> All three of those features really touch on the fact that Gentoo puts
> the user in control, when they want to be in control, and yet Gentoo
> takes care of all the other stuff on its own when the user doesn't
> need this control.

Yeah.

> That said, I don't think we need to have a paragraph worth of the pros
> and cons of custom CFLAGs.  I'd just talk about how Gentoo puts users
> in control with the ability to apply patches, optimize CFLAGs, and
> strip unnecessary dependencies.  Go ahead and mention that binary
> packages are available for large packages for users who have slower
> systems.  I'd drop all the stuff about the pros/cons of actually
> taking advantage of any of those features - save that for some other
> page for people who actually are going to start tweaking their
> systems.

Okay, I think it can be done. We should just avoid overpromising, and it
should be fine.