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Gentoo goes Binary

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Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#141

Post by bee_rider »

trelane wrote: post #123
adrian_b wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure what you mean, but in the chrooted environment where you compile for a distinct machine you obviously use configuration options, including compiler flags, appropriate for the target computer, not for the host computer, so "-mtune=native" cannot be used. My point is that you do not need to setup a binrepo or any other complication like this. You can install easily Gentoo on a very weak computer, by perfo…

> not for the host computer, so "mtune=native" cannot be used. Right, I am sure they intended it to be absurd in an amusing way.

Indeed I did.

Although, I do somewhat think that working out good optimization flags for cross-platform compiles is a moderately unusual skill, even among people who compile things regularly. Hopefully I caveated that sufficiently, I’m not saying it is a hyper-advanced dark art or anything.

I have in the past set up code on a cluster to just compile on one node for the first run with -mtune=native because I’m lazy!

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#143

Post by bee_rider »

vermaden wrote: post #60

Too little too 15 years too late. One of the reasons I moved from Gentoo 15+ years ago to FreeBSD was that it was mandatory to compile everything while FreeBSD provided binary packages. It may be not that important today - but it was a game changer with single CPU core and 1GB RAM.

Is it too late? Gentoo has always been a niche within the already niche Linux community, but they seem to keep chugging along happily. Are they having some problems?

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#144

Post by goku12 »

bee_rider wrote: post #143
vermaden wrote: post #60

Too little too 15 years too late. One of the reasons I moved from Gentoo 15+ years ago to FreeBSD was that it was mandatory to compile everything while FreeBSD provided binary packages. It may be not that important today - but it was a game changer with single CPU core and 1GB RAM.

Is it too late? Gentoo has always been a niche within the already niche Linux community, but they seem to keep chugging along happily. Are they having some problems?

They have had the binary packaging capability for a long time now. It just didn't make sense to use it on a global scale considering the vast combination of packages they could generate (due to USE flags, profiles, etc) and the infrastructure needed to distribute them. They seem to have decided to offer binaries for the most common configurations. This isn't a major change. Perhaps the infrastructure also makes more sense than before.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#145

Post by cogman10 »

oblio wrote: post #47
pjmlp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The time I wasted with Gentoo in 2004 was enough to never try it again. A full day compiling stuff only for the base install, let alone everything else I would eventually need. On my case, I decided to become another Scientific Linux tester.

The thing is, that was 20 years ago. I basically did the same thing, at almost the same time, as you. But computing power is much higher now. The same compilation now would probably take 1-2 hours, max. Updates would be super fast. Gentoo itself is considered generally stable and a pretty solid distribution, or it used to be. I wonder if these days the flexibility and the engineering behind Gentoo might be worth taki…

For kicks and giggles, I just set it up on a new system a couple of weeks back.

It's really not much different than working with Arch in terms of complexity. Initial setup takes a bit, but if you've installed arch you are pretty familiar with everything you need (in fact, arch docs are helpful for a gentoo setup :D).

The docs are VERY good and easy to google.

Compilation time can be nasty depending on what you install but not terribly bad. I just rebuilt the world because a GCC update broke lto that I'm running. With about 2k packages that took about 6 hours to complete on a Ryzen 7950.

General updates take almost no time at all (especially using git for syncing). Usually less than 10 minutes often less than 1. As I write this, I'm currently rebuilding kde (if you are using your computer, rebuilding doesn't really get in the way. Especially if you are already working with a multicore system).

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#146

Post by bombcar »

the_af wrote: post #113
gavinhoward wrote: post #86

Wow...I feel weird. A lot of the comments are saying that they tried Gentoo or used to use it. And here I am, using it as my daily driver and server workhorse. I wonder what makes me different such that Gentoo is the best for me. And I am not going to enable binary packages.

> I wonder what makes me different such that Gentoo is the best for me. Ok, I'll bite: why is Gentoo best for you? (I'm not going to try to refute any of your statements should you reply, I promise. I'm genuinely curious.) I'll offer my own experience why Gentoo is not for me: I don't run my own server, and at work I use servers in the cloud (Ubuntu based, I guess? Or AWS-flavored). No compiling any kernels or whatno…

I use Gentoo on my personal servers because it offers the customization I want with the ability to easily install from source some various strange things I have laying around.

It's a rolling release so it never has a "major blow up day" - at worst I have to spend 5-10 minutes on a "breaking" change.

My desktop is just a Mac, but my Gentoo server provides the Linux I need.

(Work servers are Ubuntu because work software wants something well-known.)

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#147

Post by [deleted] »

luispauloml wrote: post #98
jstummbillig wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only on HN could any state that Gentoo was ever in be reflected upon as "just worked like a breeze" unironically and I mean that in a fond, loving way.

I know it's off topic, but I find it interesting how this sentence was so hard for me to understand. I struggled for many seconds but couldn't go beyond "was ever" because it felt like there was some mistake, like a word was missing here or there. In the first pass, my mind decided that "state" was a verb, and, therefore, there should be a subject appearing before it. But I only found "any", instead of "anybody" or "…

[deleted]

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#148

Post by bombcar »

gavinhoward wrote: post #132
the_af wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder what makes me different such that Gentoo is the best for me. Ok, I'll bite: why is Gentoo best for you? (I'm not going to try to refute any of your statements should you reply, I promise. I'm genuinely curious.) I'll offer my own experience why Gentoo is not for me: I don't run my own server, and at work I use servers in the cloud (Ubuntu based, I guess? Or AWS-flavored). No compiling any kernels or whatno…

That's what is weird; I don't know why it's better for me! I can understand that you didn't learn anything from installing Gentoo. I did, but in my case, I was not like most new Linux users; instead of immediately trying to learn the details when I started, I just wanted to install Ubuntu and get working. It was only six years later that I installed Arch, then Linux from Scratch, then Gentoo, and in the process, I ha…

People obsess over the compiler flags (and there was a short time when everything else seemed to be x86-32bit and Gentoo was one of the very few distros where you could compile everything for amd64) but the real advantage of Portage is the USE flags; where you can turn off major things like X support, or disable IPv4 entirely, etc. Nothing else I've ever encountered allows that customizability.

And that's been much more important to me than cflags, which I set once and ignore, ever since trying to install a command-line MP3 player on an ancient RedHat brought in an entire X install.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#149

Post by gavinhoward »

bombcar wrote: post #148
gavinhoward wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what is weird; I don't know why it's better for me! I can understand that you didn't learn anything from installing Gentoo. I did, but in my case, I was not like most new Linux users; instead of immediately trying to learn the details when I started, I just wanted to install Ubuntu and get working. It was only six years later that I installed Arch, then Linux from Scratch, then Gentoo, and in the process, I ha…

People obsess over the compiler flags (and there was a short time when everything else seemed to be x86-32bit and Gentoo was one of the very few distros where you could compile everything for amd64) but the real advantage of Portage is the USE flags; where you can turn off major things like X support, or disable IPv4 entirely, etc. Nothing else I've ever encountered allows that customizability. And that's been much m…

Yes, I agree with this. I have used USE flags immensely.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#150

Post by yx827ha »

goku12 wrote: post #6

Gentoo's big attraction for me is Portage. It goes beyond just providing a build environment and dependency management. Ebuilds (Gentoo packages) are supported by great tooling and Eclasses that handle a lot of corner cases in builds. Developing Ebuilds feel like doing a real software project, and is great for anyone who wants to experiment with packages that are not in the official repository. Coincidentally, I just…

> Coincidentally, I just published a tool to manage unprivileged chroots for testing ebuilds.

You should check out what ChromeOS is doing. They are using bazel to execute ebuilds inside an ephemeral chroot: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/bazel/+/refs/he...

This way it's guaranteed that no undeclared dependencies get used.

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