"Greg Smith" <gsmith@gregsmith.com> writes:
> On Wed, 25 Jul 2007, Gregory Stark wrote:
>
>> Does gentoo these days have binary packages? source packages do implicitly
>> require custom builds...
>
> You can install with binaries now so it doesn't take forever to get started,
> but the minute you're adding/updating you're going to be building. The main
> point I was trying to make is that if you don't do anything special to
> customize the standard Gentoo compilation setup, the amount of variation
> between Gentoo builds on different machines isn't significantly greater than
> that which exists between the various Linux distributions. One could make a
> case that the big glibc differences between Debian Stable and everybody else
> right now provides a similar scale of variation in results that would impact
> reproducibility.
Well even so another Debian system with the same set of packages (at the same
version) will be equivalent to mine.
Whereas gentoo system will depend on the order that the packages were
installed. If you installed kerberos while you had an older version of the
copiler or crypto libraries installed and then upgraded the crypto library or
compiler then your kerberos library will differ from mine which was compiled
by a different compiler or against a different set of crypto headers.
So for me to reproduce your environment you would have to send me the complete
history of what packages you installed. I would have to reproduce the entire
history including installing and building intermediate versions.
> I threw out some criticism suggesting where RedHat is at a slight disadvantage
> for completeness sake, and so Gavin wasn't completely alone at expressing some
> distaste for the issues it introduces compared to Gentoo (potentially harder
> package installation and less flexiblity for running bleeding-edge kernels with
> RHEL).
Sure, that's why I run Debian and get really annoyed whenever I use a Redhat
system. One Redhat I'm forever saying "where's this utility" or "why is this
program 6 months out of date?". But that's a personal desktop machine. This is
shared resource that shouldn't be constantly changing or having new versions
of stuff installed
-- Gregory Stark EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
