[linux-audio-dev] Hello - FYI - intro

[Paul Winkler]

On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 03:41:17PM -0400, John Check wrote:
> And how long does that take vs apt-get update && apt-get dist upgrade?
> Take all the milliseconds you shave with flags and deduct 'em from the build 
> time and pig-dog slowness of a package management system that runs on an 
> interpreter,

Them's fightin' words :-P
I've never found the "pig-dog slowness" of portage to be significant
whatsoever.  It's completely dwarfed by 

I don't care about the supposed optimizations, I've never noticed
whether gentoo is any faster or what.
The things I like are:

1) It Just Works.
   Dunno if it's my increased experience or gentoo or what, but in the
   past year I've had fewer complaints with my two gentoo boxes than 
   anything else I've tried.
   I ran RH 4-7, followed by 2 years of Debian (i tried
   stable, which was really stable but really ancient; unstable, which
   was pretty current but became unbootable after updates twice;
   then testing, which went unbootable after updates once, after which
   I was done.)

2) For those times I want something bleeding edge from a tarball that's
not in the distro yet, it's trivial to tell portage "don't worry,
I've got it covered" and still be able to emerge other stuff that
depends on it.  I did this routinely with alsa and jack for a few
months when gentoo was lagging a bit behind some of the bleeding-edge 
LAD stuff.  Worked flawlessly everty time I did it.  

E.g. if gentoo is still on jack 0.94 and I want to install a hypothetical
0.99 from source, all I do is build and install the tarball, then do

  emerge inject media-sound/jack-audio-connection-kit-0.99

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com