Re: Debian, Arch or Gentoo?
From: Christopher Browne (cbbrowne_at_acm.org)
Date: 07/04/05
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Date: Mon, 04 Jul 2005 00:12:20 -0400
In an attempt to throw the authorities off his trail, Jon Harrop <usenet@jdh30.plus.com> transmitted:
> I have found Debian to be excellent. I switched from Red Hat about 5 years
> ago and never looked back.
>
> Justin wrote:
> [Gentoo]
>> It is a massive waste of time.
>
> I've heard that from other people.
>
>> Compiling from source offers
>> virtually no performance increase over pre-compiled binaries;
>
> Ironically, I'm going to have to disagree with you there. You can sometimes
> get substantial performance improvements exactly where you want them by
> compiling from source.
>
> I did this with ghostscript by fetching the Debian package source using
> "apt-get source", altering it to compile with optimisation flags for my CPU
> and then installing the replacement package. As ghostscript uses a lot of
> tight array loops with integer and floating point maths, it sped up
> considerably when switching to CPU-specific code.
There will be cases where this is the case.
But there are plenty of "Gentoo Ricers" out there looking for the
mystical set of CFLAGS options to let them maximize performance on
everything when they'd be *WAY* better off having 98% of their
packages brought in as binaries that were compiled by some competent
person that knew what they were doing.
I'd guess that there are likely to be 5% of packages where there would
be merit to compiling from source in order to take advantage of
CPU-specific flags. Examples would include:
- Possibly LIBC, although there's GREAT danger there...
- XFree86 (someday)
- Mathematical libraries (e.g. - if you're using NETLIB)
- Sound rendering libs
- Some graphical libraries (particularly for anything "chromey")
It surprises me a bit that Ghostscript would be an example of such,
but only a bit.
-- (format nil "~S@~S" "cbbrowne" "gmail.com") http://linuxdatabases.info/info/slony.html Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious animal on earth.
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