lunuxcaffe; logo contest - mystery font

[Austin]

On Sun, 2004-11-14 at 23:17 -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 13, 2004 at 10:48:49AM -0500, Austin wrote
> 
> > Mandrakelinux also uses *runtime* detection for i686 and MMX/SSE for
> > certain apps where it is advantageous, like glibc and some video
> > encoding tools.  The library loader chooses to load the more optimized
> > version of the library if appropriate.
> > 
> > Also, some apps themselves use *runtime* detection of these processor
> > features, including mplayer.  It's too bad more apps don't do that.  It
> > makes everyone's life much easier.
> 
>   Fine, but that means multiple copies of at least portions of a
> program.  You effectively have multiple versions of the program, even if
> it's one, larger, binary.  This takes up more space on disk, and possibly
> in memory.  A good coder who knows how to use a profiler may be able to
> cut this down to small portions of the entire program.

The first case, yes, we ship two copies of the .so.0 files.  We do not
ship two copies of the binary.  This creates VERY little extra disk
usage, since it's only the library, and it's only a few packages (like
10 maybe).  Only the ones that run noticeably faster with i686/MMX
optimizations (like glibc and mjpegtools).  There are VERY few apps in
this category.  (Plus, disk space is much cheaper than time, bandwidth,
and aggravation.)

In the second case, like mplayer, the binary is probably not even 1%
larger to include runtime MMX support, so your argument is way off base.

> Another area where Gentoo rocks... install Redhat or Mandrake with
> only text-console; no X; no GNOME.  Now try installing GIMP.  You'll
> probably get error messages telling you about missing dependancies.  Try
> installing the missing dependancies, and you'll get error messages about
> their dependancies, etc.  In the same scenario, "emerge gimp" calculates
> all missing dependancies, builds+installs X, builds+installs GTK/etc,
> builds+installs GNOME base libs, and finally builds+installs GIMP.  I
> did that as a "torture-test" this weekend.  On a beat-up old 400mhz PII,
> with 128 megs of RAM, that took 8hrs 47 minutes.

Yes, this is true with RedHat or SuSe, but I guarantee you, this would
work flawlessly on Mandrake.

Anyone is welcome to test it...
Make a new partition on your drive.  Run
# urpmi basesystem --root /mnt/new-partition

BANG... you have a console-only system in perfect running order.  Chroot
to it, then run:
# urpmi gimp2_0
and it will install all the missing dependencies (GTK, gnome2, jpeg,
tiff, svg, wmf, etc.) all optimized to -O2/i586.  And all this in less
than five minutes, not 9 hours.  And with icons for EVERY desktop system
(KDE, Gnome, TWM, fluxbox, ICE, WM...), and without unnecessary files
like headers and static libraries that gentoo would install... so in
fact it's LESS disk space.  (Not to mention the fact that you have a
working distro in two commands... can anyone else boast that?)

Sorry, no intent to put down Gentoo per se, but obvious untruths about
my distro make me upset.

Austin

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