10 May
2009
10 May
'09
1:49 a.m.
On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 7:11 PM, Brent Busby <brent(a)keycorner.org> wrote:
On Sun, 10 May 2009, Ray Rashif wrote:
I've already avoided getting sucked into that in my life with FreeBSD.
I use only '-O2 -march=athlon64 -pipe' and nothing else.
If I were to go to Gentoo, I wouldn't be seeking compiler optimizations
so much as freedom to keep consistent things that distros change their
minds about just as soon as you think you've found one with policies you
like. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse...I used to think they were each
mistakes in a learning process until I finally realized that at the
particular time I liked each one, it was because of something they were
each respectively doing right at the time. They just change their minds
and you have to go looking for a new "least evil choice."
I think one possibly overlooked advantage of a source-based distro is it
might give you a platform where you can adopt a policy of your own for
how things are going to be and expect that it will stay the same long
enough for you to enjoy it. I don't know, I'm still trying to decide
though, and I am open to all kinds of ideas.
Be careful with Gentoo and thinking you can keep things stable. Gentoo
removes packages from portage, sometimes quite quickly. You could
build a working machine today and find out 6 months from now that if
you tried to build the same machine again you couldn't. I've had this
problem with two machines I have that require an old ATI driver to get
video on the S-Video output, and that driver only works with old
kernels, and neither the driver or the kernel are available in portage
anymore. I was able to build this machine 4 years ago. No way I could
build it today except that I created my own overlay after finding out
that Gentoo removed everything I needed.
It's very do-able with Gentoo but you need to stay on top of it.
And I agree - compiler options are not the most important. I use very
simple CFLAGS, just as you propose. USE flags handle most of what I
need to do.
Good luck.
- Mark
From
personal experience, my very first _hobby_ project before I started out
in the
audio industry was to set up a Linux studio environment with Gentoo.
I ended up victimised and gave in to the CFLAGS club while never having
gotten anything done. That was the period of my life I wish I could fix. I