When I mention to colleagues in the IT industry that compiling packages before installing them on a computer is a good thing, they either give me a blank look or an ever slight smirk. What is the point wasting many hours waiting for some package to compile instead of fetching the binaries from a repository and have it installed in seconds?
Come to think of it, I am actually writing this while waiting for Gentoo to upgrade GCC from 3.4.4 to 4.3.1. It may not sound much but it's actually a big deal. GCC is probably the package that takes the longest slowest to build, in order order of two hours, even on recent dual-core 64bit machines.
Portage, gentoo's package management system, when installing a package, say X, will fetch X's sources from some repository, and then build X from the sources. For example, if package X was written in C, it will compile the sources and then link the resulting binary files into an executable program. As mentioned previously, this process of building from sources can take from minutes to several hours depending on the package and its dependencies. Note that if package X requires package A, B and C, and B requires D and E, and D requires F, Portage will build A,B,C,D,E and F in the correct order.
Clearly, building from sources is much slower than fetching the binary package. But, building from sources will implicitly check that the required dependencies for the package under construction are available. If X requires A,B,C,E and F if any of those five packages is missing, then X won't compile and hence will not install. Thus, if Portage is able to install X, then you can be fairly confident that it is installed correctly on your system. Of course, you would still need to configure X according to your needs, but as far as the binaries of X and its dependencies are concerned, you are reasonably safe.
Contrast it with installing binary packages. You can never be sure that you are not missing a library or if they have a conflicting version. Conceptually, Gentoo vs. Ubuntu is analogous to compiled and statically typed languages, e.g. C++ or Java, versus interpreted and dynamically typed languages, e.g. Python or Ruby.
Interpreted and dynamically typed languages enjoy a shorter development cycle but are somewhat more brittle whereas compiled and statically typed languages have a slower development cycle but are often deemed more reliable.
Another analogy would be an RDBMS enforcing data integrity constraints e.g. MySQL+InnoDB versus an RDBMS ignoring data integrity constraints, e.g. MySQL+MyISAM.
As it stands, Portage is still building GCC.
5 comments:
Fun post! One advantage of source-based distros that is more or less relevant, depending on your feelings, is that you're really taking advantage of the fact that things are open source. To most people that never makes a difference, but it does to nearly every Gentoo user.
I disagree. There is also a package manager which resolves dependencies for you in most Linux distributions. And I think there are also redundancies / conflicts in Gentoo, in exactly the same way as they exist in other distros.
I don't say that Gentoo does not make sense. It damn does. But as a professional administrator, I don't have time for building the packages everytime there is an update or a change request, even the whole building / compiling is completely automated. It's just too time-consuming.
It's about manageability, it's about "time is money" (And it's about laziness, I have to admit). Gentoo can not satisfy me in this way.
On the other hand, Gentoo makes absolutely sense where a somewhat customized environment is needed, research for example. It makes also sense for people like you, who have the time for this. It makes also sense (And this is where I really like Gentoo) for learning Linux and seeing "how deep the rabbit hole goes".
As you can see, I don't think it is possible to generally say that Gentoo makes sense or not. You just have to ask yourself - as in every other distro - if Gentoo fits your needs and if Gentoo is the right solution for the task.
Any of the common distributions today simply doesn't have the kinds of issues you seem to think they do. If you want a package, and install it through package management, it will install; if there are dependencies, they will install too. And it takes a only a couple of minutes instead of a couple of hours or more.
Sorry to say, you really are wasting your time with gentoo. (I did so myself for several months, until I realized this.)
The main problem with packaged binaries is the difficulty in creating the package. This difficulty too often results in errors in the resulting package, particularly as regards dependencies.
The real answer lies in improving the package development process, not in regressing to putting the load on the end user by requiring compilation.
Two hours? I remember FOUR DAYS compiling OpenOffice.org 1.1 on FreeBSD ... and it still didn't work afterwards, and I had to use a Linux binary under compat ;-)
Post a Comment