Re: Machine available for community use

On Wed, 25 Jul 2007, Gregory Stark wrote:

> Does gentoo these days have binary packages? source packages do implicitly
> require custom builds...

You can install with binaries now so it doesn't take forever to get
started, but the minute you're adding/updating you're going to be
building. The main point I was trying to make is that if you don't do
anything special to customize the standard Gentoo compilation setup, the
amount of variation between Gentoo builds on different machines isn't
significantly greater than that which exists between the various Linux
distributions. One could make a case that the big glibc differences
between Debian Stable and everybody else right now provides a similar
scale of variation in results that would impact reproducibility.

> for this situation I would actually agree that Redhat is a better fit in
> that it's "canonical".

I threw out some criticism suggesting where RedHat is at a slight
disadvantage for completeness sake, and so Gavin wasn't completely alone
at expressing some distaste for the issues it introduces compared to
Gentoo (potentially harder package installation and less flexiblity for
running bleeding-edge kernels with RHEL). His preference for Gentoo is
completely defensible if you understand his priorities, and I'd hate to
see a knee-jerk reaction against that distribution based just on how
Gentoo can be abused and how it differs from other Linux variants.

But I run RHEL&Centos on several machines so I certainly wouldn't go so
far as to argue against it being appropriate here. The nice thing about
RedHat and its clones is that even when you run into a situation where
packages might be harder to install than you'd like them to be, the
userbase is so big and skilled that the problems are usually visible (odds
are good other people are running into the issue as well), reproducible on
other builds, and you can get plenty of help resolving them.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD