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Gentoo goes Binary

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Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#151

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

1oooqooq wrote: post #63
chpatrick wrote: post #53

I think NixOS has kind of taken over anything I would use Gentoo for.

you build "impure" (in nixos speak) packages for all your software? if not this is not a close comparisson. gentoo shines when you need system wide control of build flags (for perf or security)

It seems like a close comparison to me. The inputs to nix derivations aren't always directly named after the build flags they control, but ultimately they control build flags. If you disable the binary cache then you're building everything yourself with system wide control of build flags.

Purity has to do with whether you let those builds depend on things that found lying around on the system versus things that are explicitly in the derivation (i.e. a pure build can tolerate missing files by building them, an impure one may get stuck for lack of a dependency or because a dependency was not as expected).

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#152

Post by TrueDuality »

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…

I agree on customizing the package flags, and features. When using Gentoo in production it became an important part of our security posture to omit the features and integrations with unused software.

That being said we've always had a build host dedicated to producing binaries, but the actual support for binaries in Gentoo hasn't been great. Unsigned serving over HTTP or NFS of compiled artifacts is about all you get. I'm really pumped to see that the new package format adds in cryptographic verification that really should have been there all along even for internal only serving.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#154

Post by andix »

Gentoo was great fun, when I was young and had a lot of time. It worked surprisingly well. But I often skipped installing security updates, because it could take days to finish on a slow system.

Maybe some day I will get nostalgic and try it out again, but I really don't miss it yet. It's also quite a waste of CPU power and energy to compile everything from scratch without a real need.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#155

Post by matoro »

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…

Can you please share the tool in question? I have been desperately looking for something like this for my sandbox project.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#156

Post by BSDobelix »

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?

~Gentoo is probably the most installed "Desktop"-Linux in the world -> ChromeBooks

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/ChromeOS

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#158

Post by lucideer »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #153

I don't use Gentoo, but isn't the whole point that you compile everything? Could anyone explain some pros/cons of Gentoo other than squeezing out performance for your specific machine?

It's got very similar benefits to Arch in terms of system setup and configuration with a few extras:

- for the binary version the difference might not be as significant but bit for bit I'd say it's still more configurable than Arch

- in terms of choices they've made about conventional system defaults, there's more interesting options on offer: especially when it comes to Systemd -vs- OpenRC & networkmanager -vs- netifrc

- I'm not sure how true this last point is, but I get the impression the system of overlays & profiles is a little more expressive & powerful than equivalents in other distros. E.g. Manjaro is often considered to be something of bastardisation of Arch by virtue of some underlying design decisions made in "forking / extending" it, & compatibility is limited. On the other hand things like Funtoo & Pentoo are really just Gentoo at heart, using its core features for packaging distro customisations.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#159

Post by krmboya »

andix wrote: post #154

Gentoo was great fun, when I was young and had a lot of time. It worked surprisingly well. But I often skipped installing security updates, because it could take days to finish on a slow system. Maybe some day I will get nostalgic and try it out again, but I really don't miss it yet. It's also quite a waste of CPU power and energy to compile everything from scratch without a real need.

It may look like a waste to compile from scratch but it's great for reproducible builds.

That can important in cases where you need to be sure you are running the source code that you can see

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#160

Post by II2II »

pjmlp wrote: post #61
oblio wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even 1-2 hours is too much for me. I rather use programming languages ecosystems that favour binary libraries for a reason.

A lot of the reason depends upon what you hope to get from the labour and the overall environment that you are working within.

I was working with a 486 around 1995. Compiling your own software was the norm and compiling your own kernel could have significant performance benefits (even if it was just to conserve the limited memory supported by machines of the day, to head off some of the swapping). By the time I learned of Gentoo, that was not really the case: most of the software one could obtain was provided in binary form and compiler optimizations were much less relevant (unless you had a special workload).

The tooling provided is important too. I was using NetBSD for a while. For the most part you just started the compilation process and walked away until it was done. (I imagine Portage is similar.) You didn't get the instant gratification, but it was not time intensive in the sense that you had to attend to the process. That was very much unlike my earlier experiences in compiling software for Linux, stuff that isn't in the repos, since it did have to be attended to.

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