Kurt Granroth wrote:
> Why? HORRIBLE quality assurance on the packages. We grew to dread every
> update because we knew that something else was going to completely break...
> since *something* always did.
Did you do an etc-update after every update world? Did you re-link gcc
if a new version compiled itself?
I completely disagree with the "never upgrade your system" camp which
you declared. I've never had that kind of trouble with Gentoo, I've
found it equals apt-get for keeping your system up to date in speed and
convenience.
I always recommend Gentoo over Debian and Slackware as a person's first
"advanced" operating system, as the documentation in Gentoo is the most
gentle one out there, and after learning it, I'm comfortable with rpm,
rpm-source, or raw ./configure && make && make install with custom
configure flags in many other distros, and I would know how to approach
rolling my own distro if given the time and need.
You don't have 9 hours of "free time" to compile Gnome? You sleep,
don't you? Let it run overnight. Regardless, I'm starting to prefer
fluxbox after seeing DSL's application of it.
DO NOT put ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" in your make.conf. It's not the
equivalent of Debian's unstable, it's far worse. Put it in
packages.keywords WITH the specific version number of a package only if
you really really really need the unstable version. Gentoo doesn't
operate like Debian, stable Gentoo is far more hip than Debian's stable,
and when Gentoo masks packages as unstable, it's really really unstable.
I agree with the idea that Gentoo works best on a LAMP or similar
setup. If you have a server which has a razor-sharp task, like doing
nothing but SAMBA share, doing nothing but PostgreSQL or doing nothing
but MySQL, then Gentoo really shines, whereas a desktop kinda has
"everything" in it anyway, so the benefit over an all-binary repository
is lost.
I think the personal achievement benefit really comes through, though,
not in a masochistic way, you do learn how Linux works deep inside.
Once my work required me to screen-scrape some site, so I needed
PERL::LWP, but my workplace was being obstructionist, I only had a
Windows box. I installed Cygwin on my box, and when I came across
problems I knew exactly how to beat it. Namely, OpenSSL 0.9.8 wasn't
compatible with PERL::SSLeay, which is required to access an https:
website. Cygwin only comes with 0.9.8. I compiled openSSL 0.9.7 into
its own directory within Cygwin into /usr/local/openssl097, and when
CPAN configured SSLeay I told it where openSSL was. Took me an hour to
come up with and finish the solution, and I thank my knowing Gentoo for it.
Use emerge -atvuDN world, you'll really see everything as it happens
this way, and intercept problems before the upgrade if any.
--
Alexander
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