Gentoo desktop?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 12:07:40PM -0500, Anthony de Boer wrote:
> There are a lot of different Linux distros, then there are the BSDs and
> Solaris, etc, and I'm old enough to remember the legendary UNIX which
> begat them.  The choices we have today are each optimized toward a
> particular use.  If I were you, I'd probably be using Debian too, but for
> the purpose of being able to "look under the sheets" and see source code
> and the build process and how the whole system hangs together, and being
> able to tweak it as I see fit, Gentoo is meeting that need quite well. 
> Note that I'm not insisting on it being the right choice in all
> circumstances.  I've used a bunch of the others, trying out ZFS in the
> upcoming FreeBSD 7.0 release is looking intriguing, and over the years
> some things die and others arise (there's an internal tempest threatening
> Gentoo at the moment, which I hope they resolve; I was using something
> else before it and may eventually find myself using something else after
> it).  And sometimes you'd want to pick a best-common-denominator
> OS/distro to use for everything, rather than tracking how things work in
> a bunch of them.  And an employer's distro of choice does mean
> specializing in that one for them too.

I do look under the hood.  I make new packages, I fix packages or update
them in some cases.  The debian package build system is the best I have
ever worked with.  After switching to Debian I have also started using
non x86 machines and having one distribution that works the same
everywhere is rather handy.

I have started jobs at a company that was using redhat everywhere.  When
I left a few years later we had gone debian everywhere.  I used to be a
redhat user until it got to crappy to tolerate, while at the same time
debian was starting to become uncrappy enough to tolerate so I switched.
I have also used slackware before redhat, and SLS before that, and
solaris and hp-ux at times as well.  I hope solaris has managed to get a
better package management system since I used it, and that hp-ux has
just plain gotten better at everything since I used it.  I have
installed and used netbsd (openbsd's installer and support turned out to
be rather crappy on the hardware I was installing it on) a bit as well.

My next job I helped decide what to use and debian made sense so we use
it.

It is possible to influence decisions, and sometimes what was a good
decision at one time is no longer a good decision.  Times change.
Claiming that something is perfect and being unwilling to look at other
solutions is a bad idea.  Look at new ideas, but don't assume new is
necesarily good and don't assume new is necesarily bad.  Both will get
you in trouble.

My goal with computers is to make them better and more efficient.  I
believe in scripting things that are likely to be done more than once,
and in not having people do duplicate work, which to me is one of the
prime purposes of open source software.  Don't write code to do the same
thing someone else already did unless you can make it much better, in
which case you should probably go improve the existing code if it is
recuable.  Don't do the same work other people have already done, which
means don't compile the same package someone else already did with the
same result.  Yeah gentoo lets you pick the configuration of the package
in some cases, but at the same time making the code modular and able to
use libraries at runtime would be a better more flexible solution in the
long term since that way you compile everything one, and only install
and use the modules you need.  Works for PHP on debian at least among
others.

> One of the early firewall publications (the FWTK manual, if I recall)
> had a cartoon of a worried-looking sysadmin with the caption "I'm
> paranoid.  But am I paranoid _enough_?"  That's the sort of work I've
> done over the past number of years, with firewalling and host security
> and application robustness and storage redundancy/backups.  (Is anyone
> hiring?!?)

Unless you actually go read every line of source code to ensure there
are no traps hidden in it, then you are no better off than using a
prebuilt binary.  You have to trust the supplier either way.  Believing
you are being more careful and more thorough doesn't mean you are.

And where do you get the compiler you used to compile everything?  You
have to have a bootstrap compiler at some point, and people have made
hidden tings in compilers that could pass on to the next compiler built,
although whether such things have ever left the research lab or gone
beynd proof of concept I am not sure.  I kind of hope not.

Whenever I get a new driver from one of our suppliers to fix some
problem, I diff the code against the previous version to see what
changed.  This is to see that what changed makes sense in terms of what
was supposedly fixed, and to check that no other unrelated changes were
made that I should worry about.  The reason I do that is that I know
they have made mistakes in the past.  In general I don't do that for
everything.  I spend my time where I expect it to be worthwhile.

--
Len Sorensen
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