Ubuntu first time

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On 01/10/2012 07:10 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> I have upgraded libc.  Didn't affect anything else.  I have upgraded gcc,
> again, didn't affect anything else.

You just reminded me of a Gentoo horror story. It was around 2005 or 
2006 that I tried Gentoo on a P3-850MHz ThinkPad that was getting 
long-in-the-tooth. Gentoo could supposedly be more efficient so I 
thought it could make that machine usable with the maximum of 512M of 
RAM that it had. It took days to build the system, KDE, OpenOffice, 
Firefox, etc.

Shortly thereafter, there was a major change in glibc, which meant that 
first, the entire build toolchain had to be rebuilt and then everything 
else had to be rebuilt using the new toolchain. I remember that the 
build would bail out at various points and in Googling, I found some 
lengthy articles about how non-deterministic that particular scenario 
was. Many people had given up and just done a fresh install but there 
was no way that I was going to spend days fiddling around with my system 
periodically just to have a usable system. I gave up and realized that 
any advantages of Gentoo were illusory and looked at that whole sorry 
episode as a big waste of time. I'll take binary distros, thank you. CPU 
cycles are cheaper than my time and that's assuming the big if of 
whether Gentoo is in fact any faster.
-- 
Regards,

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

<http://dinamis.com>
+1 416-410-3326
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