> It is for this reason that I hate rpm-based distros. Not to start a
> distro war or anything but I too ran Mandrake for awhile. I was running
> 8.2 and waiting for 9.2 to come out before I upgraded. During the time I
> was waiting for 9.2 (no longer waiting), I tried out Gentoo
> (http://www.gentoo.org) on another box. Heaven! Everything is always up
> to date and compiled with just what you specify. Yes, that can be a
> downside for slow boxes, having to compile everything from source but on
> the faster boxes (Duron 800 and up), it's bliss because you can specify
> various compile flags to optimise for your very hardware.
> Sorry for the ramble but, my point is: After trying Gentoo linux, my
> patience for RPM (and Mandrake) went straight to zero and I upgraded all
> my production servers to Gentoo as soon as I could (about a week of
> downtime each) but well worth it to keep up with various security
> exploits etc.
Another nice thing about Gentoo, if all your machines are the same in regards to
CPU and what compile flags you want to use, you can use one box to do all the
builds on and then push the binary packages to the other machines rather than
having every box suffer the load of compiling every app that they all need (e.g.
glibc, kernel, etc...).
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