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[Walter Dnes]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2004 at 11:48:37AM -0500, JoeHill wrote

> You read my mind...that was my next question re Gentoo, whether there
> was some choice about building from source or installing pre-compiled
> binaries. Thanks!

  I'm getting my feet wet in Gentoo too.  There is a similar discussion
to this one right now on the Gentoo list.  There are several responses
similar to "OK.  Debian is that a way --->" (That was the polite version).
The webpage at http://dev.gentoo.org/~rac/binaries.html explains some of
the problems with pre-compiled binaries, such as...

> The same version of exim is perfectly capable of building and
> operating properly against either MySQL 3.x or MySQL 4.x, so the
> dependency can be simply specified as "MySQL". However, a binary
> built against 4.x cannot be deployed against 3.x, because the soname
> of the shared library has changed.

  Modern OS's have two choices.  Either each program can be compiled
monolithically, and load its own copy of glibc+friends, and use up all
your memory in no-time-flat if you have multiple programs open.  Or you
can compile programs to all use the same shared libraries.  In that case,
you're down to lowest-common-denominator builds.  And you *MUST* have
the same or almost the same critical libraries as the machine the
software was built on.  This is where "DLL-hell" comes from.  The shared
DLL model creates dependencies; doesn't matter if it's Windows or linux.

  Building manually can be a hit-n-miss affair.  That's why most distros
have some form of dependancy resolution.  E.g. if you want to install
GIMP, but don't even have X installed yet, "emerge --pretend gimp" gets
the following response...

These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating dependencies  ...done!
[ebuild  N    ] media-libs/libexif-0.5.12-r1
[ebuild  N    ] media-libs/libpng-1.2.7
[ebuild  N    ] media-libs/freetype-2.1.5-r1
[ebuild  N    ] x11-misc/ttmkfdir-3.0.9-r2
[ebuild  N    ] media-libs/fontconfig-2.2.3
[ebuild  N    ] x11-base/opengl-update-1.7.2
[ebuild  N    ] x11-base/xorg-x11-6.8.0-r1
[ebuild  N    ] x11-libs/pango-1.4.1
[ebuild  N    ] app-arch/rpm2targz-9.0-r2
[ebuild  N    ] sys-apps/utempter-0.5.5.5
[ebuild  N    ] x11-terms/xterm-196
[ebuild  N    ] media-libs/jpeg-6b-r3
[ebuild  N    ] dev-perl/XML-Parser-2.34
[ebuild  N    ] dev-util/intltool-0.30
[ebuild  N    ] dev-libs/atk-1.6.1
[ebuild  N    ] dev-libs/libxml2-2.6.15-r1
[ebuild  N    ] x11-misc/shared-mime-info-0.14
[ebuild  N    ] x11-libs/gtk+-2.4.9-r1
[ebuild  N    ] media-libs/libart_lgpl-2.3.16
[ebuild  N    ] media-libs/glut-3.7.1
[ebuild  N    ] dev-python/pyopengl-2.0.0.44
[ebuild  N    ] gnome-base/libglade-2.4.0
[ebuild  N    ] x11-libs/gtkglarea-1.99.0
[ebuild  N    ] dev-python/pygtk-2.2.0
[ebuild  N    ] media-gfx/gimp-2.0.4

  There are advantages and disadvantages either way.  Whichever fits you
best is up to you.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
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