Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo's advantage: 'optimized for your system' -- huh?

[Jesús Guerrero]

El Mie, 4 de Febrero de 2009, 0:06, Paul Hartman escribió:
> On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 4:39 PM, Grant Edwards <grante@××××.com> wrote:
>
>> Whenever I see a write-up of Gentoo, it's describe as a system
>> similar to BSD "ports" where you build packages from source. The main
>> benefit claimed for this approach is that you get better performance
>> because all executables are optimized for exactly the right instruction
>> set.
>>
>> Where did that bit of apocrypha come from, and why is it
>> parroted by so many people?
>
> I've never done any benchmarks on my system of i386 vs core2 or
> anything like that... I think the fact that gentoo allows you to control
> compiler flags which can potentially give you speedups is more of it. But,
> like you, building from source is kind of a side-effect of Gentoo and not
> the reason why. Compiling for the sake of compiling is just a waste of
> time, and that's why a lot of people say "Just use Ubuntu" or whatever.

Not really. Compiling the things gives you control over what
dependencies will that package have. In a binary distro mplayer
will usually push like 80 or 800 (I never counted them) packages
due to the number of features that it potentially has.

If you don't install those, then the ldd info of the binary is
broken because it can't find the needed object files outside of
mplayer.

Compiling the packages allow you to tune CFLAGS, ok. But even if
you think that -most times- this doesn't make a difference, it's
still worth the trouble compiling it, if only for the sake of
mplayer not having to depend on 200MB of additional software for it
to install correctly.

In gentoo, this is as easy as to set your use flags up, and then
emerge. Easy as hell, and you don't have to go ./configure'ing
with a dozen parameters every single package in your system,
because portage takes cares of that.

I absolutely don't care much about the CFLAGS stuff, I just set
up my -march and forget about it for years. And I think that
there's a lot of point in using GEntoo, even if you have zero
interest in compiling sofware there're still a lot of reasons
why I would use Gentoo over any other Linux.


-- 
Jesús Guerrero