Bye Bye YellowDog ... hello Gentoo

[Tim Seufert]

On Saturday, December 21, 2002, at 07:27  PM, Konstantin Riabitsev 
wrote:

> On Sat, 2002-12-21 at 21:18, Bernard Mentink wrote:
>> 1. No dependancy Hell !!!
>
> Dependency hell is guaranteed with any system, unless you compile
> everything statically.
>
>> 2. Compiled source optimized for my machine.
>
> This must be one of the silliest fads out there. Besides, while this is
> relatively applicable to the x86 systems, I really-really doubt that 
> gcc
> will make any distinction between ppc processors, so compiling a piece
> of software on your g4 will very likely result in the identical code as
> compiled on any other ppc processor.

gcc does have optimization targets for different PPC processors 
(-mcpu=750, -mcpu=604, etc.).   However, in the past I've often found 
that the effect of selecting one can be unexpected.  The target CPU 
which best optimizes the particular program you're compiling may not be 
the same as the CPU you're using to actually run the code.  :)

I agree that it's a silly fad.  Few packages are worth expending much 
effort to optimize, since so much software in a Linux distribution is 
used only occasionally (if ever).  And if you have a particular package 
that you really want optimized to the hilt, you can always grab the 
source RPM and build a custom binary RPM from it which is optimized in 
whatever fashion you feel necessary, retaining all the benefits of 
package dependency tracking.  I'd assume the same is possible on dpkg 
based distributions.