Gentoo desktop?

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

Anthony de Boer wrote:
> I was talking to one of the key Debian people awhile ago, and he said
> that the percentage of source downloads relative to binary downloads
> on the Debian FTP mirrors is rather small.  People are happy with it,
> but they're not looking under the sheets.
> 
> And you _can_ find Red Hat source RPMSs (SRPMs) too, if you look hard
> enough.

"If you look hard enough" implies that SRPMs are not easy to find. That 
is absolutely not true.

> However, I don't _want_ to run a binary distribution like Debian or
> Fedora or Microsoft Windows where you get binaries somebody else built.
> I want the SOURCE.  Don't get between me and the source code.  I want
> to see source, and I want to see it building.

If seeing compiler output on the console gives you the illusion of 
greater control, building an SRPM is not going to shatter that illusion. 
You can see lots of "useful information" spewed onto the console with 
SRPMs too. Nothing stops you from using the build system that a binary 
distro uses to build from source. That most choose not to use that 
facility does not mean it does not exist. After all, the binary RPMs had 
to be built somehow.

> Call me a programmer or
> something, but source code is important to me.

You have it with other distros too. On balance, I think Gentoo's 
negatives outweigh the positives. The last time I tried Gentoo, there 
was a major change in the version of gcc. That required a rebuild of the 
toolchain and then a subsequent rebuild of the system. One of the 
purported advantages of Gentoo is supposed to be that you never have to 
reinstall but instead you do rolling upgrades. I eventually discovered 
that it was way too much hassle to upgrade with a major change, like a 
gcc/glibc version change. It required multiple passes and how many 
passes were required was non-deterministic. I came to the conclusion 
that it was easier to reinstall from scratch than troubleshoot and deal 
with the many packages that broke during the upgrade process. If I have 
to reinstall anyway, I would rather do it with a binary distro, thank 
you very much.

As Lennart has pointed out, using a binary distro where many others use 
the same package with the same compilation options makes it more likely 
that if you are experiencing a problem, it will also be experienced by 
others as well and thus, it will be more likely you will find a solution.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
1419-3266 Yonge St.
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

<http://dinamis.com>
+1 416-410-3326
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists