Re: [gentoo-user] Re: can one tell me: gentoo vs opensuse

[Michael Mol]

On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 8:44 AM, Harry Putnam <reader@×××××××.com> wrote:
> One point no one has mentioned and I've wondered from time to time
> myself is whether one can expect gentoo to continue into the future
> for a long while, as compared to the likely hood of opensuse or maybe
> debian that has been around a very long time.
>
> It seemed at one time a year or so ago that gentoo's longevity was
> questionable. (Possibly my own mis-perception)

From my rudimentary gatherings while reading related blogs and
historical perspectives, there are just two or three people who have
been at the core of Gentoo for a very, very long time. Gentoo has long
been the work of many hands, but these guys have been around the block
a far more times. I don't know how well Gentoo would fare if one or
three of them were to drop off the face of the earth.

> For the OP, a few posters have mentioned that under gentoo, every
> thing is compiled from scratch, but it was not made clear that it
> happens again and again at most updates.
>
> No one has made clear that there is a very HUGE amount of time sunk
> into compiling absolutely everything.

I'd say "bull", but that depends *greatly* on your hardware. When I
talk about Gentoo with my friends, they admit to having tried it, but
then say it took them a long, long time to build a system on their
486.  You don't want to run Gentoo compiles on a 486. You probably
ought not to run Gentoo compiles on any x86 processor older than an
Athlon64 or Intel Core chip.

For me, an emerge -e @world takes somewhere between four and ten
hours, depending if it's the eight-core Xeon box or the quad-core
Phenom box. As others noted in the build-speed optimization thread,
it's pretty trivial to tune the system so that it doesn't impact many
(most?) normal user activities, and can go on in the background.
Otherwise, a full system rebuild isn't much more time consuming than
something like a dist-upgrade on Debian or Ubuntu.

There are factors you can tweak to go one way or the other, too. You
might use bindists for chromium, firefox, thunderbird, xulrunner,
libreoffice... That'd probably cut my Phenom system's compile time by
about a quarter. I know installing a full KDE package set would
*increase* build time on my system by about the same.

The vast majority of the time, you're not building a full package set,
but just ten or eleven packages. (if you let things slip a week or
two, like I'm apt to do)

>
> A single update, if one lets updating slip a bit, can literally take
> days to compile.

AFAIK, it can't take longer than an emerge -e @world, which I described above.

> And more days to reconfigure so that everything works
> again.

That seems very unusual, unless by "a bit" you're talking on the order
of six months.


-- 
:wq