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Gentoo goes Binary

gentoo.org

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Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#81

Post by yung_steezy »

Baldbvrhunter wrote: post #36
Zetobal wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The functionality in portage was there since forever the standard packages (think of it like a standard ubuntu install) were there for forever. They only branched out and offer more binary packages. Which is absolutely great but not a new feature... The headline is still misleading.

from the gentoo page > we’re now also offering binary packages for download and direct installation! For most architectures, this is limited to the core system and weekly updates - not so for amd64 and arm64 however. There we’ve got a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker. Gentoo stable, updated daily. Enjoy! And read on for more details!

They've had a binary version of the full fat linux kernel available for a few years now. Other packages like firefox-bin have been available since before I started using gentoo in 2017.

Edit: Actually looking into this more the headline is accurate. This is the first time they've provided official binaries aside from stage3s when doing the initial installation.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#82

Post by dordoka »

phh wrote: post #65
intsunny wrote: post #48

I shudder to think how many sky high electricity bills and greenhouse gases were released to needlessly compile the same software over and over again.

Wanna talk about JS? Java?

Contrary to popular belief, Java is amongst the most efficient languages regarding power consumption.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#83

Post by tmoravec »

globular-toast wrote: post #69
intsunny wrote: post #48

I shudder to think how many sky high electricity bills and greenhouse gases were released to needlessly compile the same software over and over again.

I heat my home. The difference between heating via compiling my kernel and heating via whatever heating you use is almost certainly negligible. But I get a custom built system out of it too. I don't cool my home, though.

The difference between a heat pump and resistive heating is certainly not negligible.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#84

Post by BSDobelix »

netdur wrote: post #13
iamgopal wrote: post #3

Years ago, somehow, I wasted hours and days of computer and my time, compiling and fine tuning my gentoo system, god knows why, when next day I anyway format it to install newly arrived Ubuntu cd.

I had toshiba satellite with some whooping 96MB RAM... as main computer even... happily ran Windows 98... them I got the book "Linux from scratch" the rest is history... now I am happy mac user.

Have you try'd "MacOS from scratch"? It's even harder ;)

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#85

Post by speed_spread »

So, they just hold more binary packages than before? How tame. They should push further and make it easy for people using the same CFLAGS to share their binaries through torrents based on decentralized trust.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#86

Post by gavinhoward »

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.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#87

Post by _0xdd »

Always have a soft spot for Gentoo. The first distro I ever used was RH 6.1, but Gentoo helped me actually learn how the system works (e.g., partitioning, the FS layout, how a bootloader works, what an init system is, etc.)

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#88

Post by nubinetwork »

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.

> 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.

Persistence like a Saint? Hard to say. I've been using it for 20 years too.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#89

Post by adrian_b »

mid-kid wrote: post #38
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…

For me this is great news for less powerful devices I use that I don't feel like setting up a binrepo for (especially when it involves cross-compilation), but still want to reuse my portage config and custom ebuilds for.

For less powerful devices it has always been possible to install Gentoo in a chroot directory on a powerful computer, using a configuration appropriate for the less powerful device, compile and install in the chroot environment any packages, and then just copy all the files from the chroot directory, through Ethernet or using a USB memory, over the root HDD/SSD of the less powerful device.

I have used Gentoo in this way on many small computers with various kinds of Atom CPUs and with a small DRAM memory and small and slow SSD/HDD.

With multiple computers of a compatible kind, the files from such a chrooted installation compiled on a powerful computer can be copied over all of them and everything will work fine. If the chrooted installation is preserved, it can be updated later with other software packages and all the changes can be propagated with rsync on all other computers.

Linux is not like Windows, which will complain when run on a different computer than that on which it was installed initially.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#90

Post by rjzzleep »

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.

Sad to say that you are completely right, for the longest time after being on gentoo for a long time I switched to macos for a few years, and was using gentoo prefix, which is vastly superior than Homebrew. I added patches to fix upstream llvm to work in gentoo prefix on macos almost a decade ago [1]

I finally met someone at the GSoC reunion that wanted to get me maintainer status, but I never got them to follow through. He had already warned me that it would be a complicated task to accomplish. I kept mentioning prefix needing binaries as well. Imagine if gentoo prefix had been as easy to install packages as homebrew on a mac.

It's sad, but gentoo is a good example of why an open source project that is technically superior, cannot survive inferior solutions without good stewardship if they disregard some basic end user quality of life features. I would argue that that is also what killed opensolaris/illumos(which is basically on life support), because the people in charge could never get past their elitism and decide that for community engagement the kernel build needs something more simple that 100 layers of nested incomprehensible makefile/shell spaghetti.

[1] https://github.com/fishman/timebomb-gentoo-osx-overlay/tree/...

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