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

[Grant]

> 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.

More often than not, when I read that description of "Gentoo's
advantage" it is meant to turn people off.  Ricer, etc.

- Grant

> Where did that bit of apocrypha come from, and why is it
> parroted by so many people?
>
> AFAICT, the "performance" benefit due to compiler optimization
> is practically nil in real-world usage.
>
> In my experience the huge benefit of source-based distros such
> as Gentoo is elimination of the library dependency-hell that
> mires other binary-based distros.
>
> For many years I ran RedHat and then Mandrake.  After a year or
> so, they became impossible to maintain because of library
> version conflicts.  Every time I tried up upgrade an RPM package
> to fix a bug or security hole, it required a handful of
> libraries to be upgraded, but doing that would break a bunch of
> other RPMs for which upgrades weren't available. The solution
> was always to start building stuff from sources.  Once you
> started doing that, the package manager would get upset because
> it doesn't know about some stuff that's installed (unless you
> built from source RPMs, which had another set of problems).
>
> The second benefit is that with Gentoo, upgrading a system
> actually works over the long-run.  With RedHat/Mandrake, things
> would gradually deteriorate to the point where the system was
> unmaintainable, but attempting to upgrade between major
> releases was always futile.  I've had Gentoo machines that have
> been upgraded for 4-5 years without any significant problems
> (failed hard-drives don't count).
>
> The third main benefit I've seen is that there are vastly more
> packages available for Gentoo.  Putting together and
> maintaining an ebuild appears to take a lot less work than
> putting together and maintaining a binary RPM package.  I've
> had far fewer problems with third party ebuilds than I did with
> third-party RPMs (on the rare occasions when I found one for
> some obscure application I wanted to run).  Again, the solution
> was always "build from sources".
>
> Are the real benefits of Gentoo too hard to explain to the
> unwashed masses, so instead they're told the fairy tale about
> imporoved performance?
>
> --
> Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow! !  Up ahead!  It's a