Slashdot Mirror
Should You Pre-Compile Binaries or Roll Your Own?
Jane Walker writes "The completion of pre-compiled packages and maximizing machine performance are two powerful incentives for Windows admins to use Linux and compile an OSS package." TechTarget has an article taking a look at some of the "why" behind rolling your own. What preferences have other Slashdot users developed, and why?
You'd get 100% bonus for a 10% speedup?
And they don't have the resources to decrease the server load from over 100% (it's over 100% since you said you're backlogged) ?
What happens when a server dies? It just gets worse?
Also, are you counting the time in your overhead in that "time saving" 10%? Would you get your 100% bonus if you now had to spend 20% of your time on this 10% speed increase?
I gave up on gentoo fundamentally because of its *lack* of control.
The problem is the USE flags are global.. you can override them for an individual package but that doesn't get recorded anywhere - on the next emerge world it'll happily forget all your carefully crafted options and reinstall with its global defaults.
The killer for me with lynx. Most distros have a minimal lynx that works in text mode. By default the gentoo one is dependent on X, about a million fonts, etc. You can override that on the command line using a local USE flagbut what happens at the next update? Your nice small lynx that you need for diagnostics, single user boots etc. is replaced with a graphical behemoth that's almost useless for that task.
I found that happening so much in gentoo I just gave up on it (the small fact that some of the stuff I needed had compile errors didn't help either).
Really lame. I'd pen a post lamenting what Slashdot has come to these days, but that would only serve to convey an expectation of something greater, which, frankly, is just sad...
:|
So SM posts this for shits and giggles. Fair enough. It brings the Gentoo Ricer crowd out, which is entertaining for the rest of us and generates page views ergo ad revenue. I can almost see a four steps to profit cliché here, but I'll leave that to someone else.
Seriously though, what a load of bollocks. I certainly can't claim to have the vintage of some of the 20+ years sysadmins on here, but I've been a Linux user for 7-8 years now and that is evidently long enough to come to understand the merits of package management. Yes, when you're fat and fifteen and still living in your parent['s|s'] basement with nothing better to do all day than stick it out watching makefile lines scroll by, Gentoo seems like a good idea. If you're really fucking sad, you might even notice a perceptible difference.
But fuck, please stop trolling like a bunch of Mac/Ogg/etc zealots telling the rest of us about it - we don't fucking care. We have jobs to do, partners to go home to, lives to get on with. If I did still care for Linux on my main machine, Ubuntu would have me up and running in an hour or so - I couldn't have my computer out of action for a day because it's...er...compiling.
Now don't get me wrong - I understand the mentality. I know the mentality. It's the same mentality that led me to reinstall Windows anything as frequently as once a week for a period in an attempt to get it running tip top. It's about the struggle, the fun of getting there, the war, the conflict, the strife - that's the fun part. I am of a computing generation that cut its teeth editing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files with elaborate startup menu configurations to optimise memory availability for specific applications (remember expanded memory, anyone?).* And it was great - we loved it, well, some of us did - until we actually had to get some work done.
Now I have to get work done, so I use a Mac. And countless Linux sysadmins out there will say the same thing - in the real world, you have to deliver results. Real, actual results. Dependability. Not downing the server every evening for a recompile. Reliability. Actual rather than theoretical uptime. We simply don't have time to be sitting round waiting for X to build so we can just sling some graphics on the screen.
And if y'all were doing something useful with your lives, neither would you...
iqu
(* Kudos to John Gruber for reminding me (through quoting someone else) of the glory days of MS-DOS - choice quote: "As a PC user, enduring the grotesqueries of that experience is something that we are actually proud of.")
Precompiled binaries is what Windows users use because Windows supports them, unlike Linux.