[Techtalk] Debian versus GenToo

[Devdas Bhagat]

On 18/09/04 07:57 +1000, Kathryn Andersen wrote:
> No, I don't wish to start a religious war. 8-)
> I am trying to assess whether I should switch over from Debian/Testing
> to GenToo, by asking you folk who would likely have experience of both.
> What are the pros and cons?
> Obviously one pro is that GenToo is likely to run faster, and one con is
> that it's harder to install.

The faster is not a big pro. The really big pro that you get with Gentoo
is the customisation options, aka USE flags.
If you want to has a custom set of packages linked, Gentoo makes
following the dependency chain easy.
Lets say, you want to install the latest stable PostgreSQL (7.4.5), and then
link Postfix and PHP against it. Doing this with other distributions
involves you following the source dependencies by hand and then building
them all. Gentoo takes care of this for you automatically.

Gentoo is /not/ hard to install. The documentation on the live CD is
quite good. What scares people is that there is no "friendly" installer
to walk them through the install.

Expect to meet the rough edge of Linux. You are expected to edit text
files, with no friendly frontends. System documentation as available
with the package is installed, no separate documentation packages.

If you have used a BSD, then you will know exactly what I am speaking
about. If not, Gentoo is a fun experience.

> 
> - What's the relative bandwidth consumption of keeping up to date with
>   GenToo as opposed to Debian (I'm on dialup, so this is important)

Gentoo offers a system named portage, using which you just update a few
text files, using rsync. The bandwidth consumption is quite low.

> - How stable is GenToo?  Is it like running on Debian/unstable all the

Stability depends on how well you run the system and avoid the tendency
to over optimise (-O2 in CFLAGS is good enough, you don't need to go -O3
with other experimental options for that last bit of performance).

Package version numbers are not constant, but the stability of the
system is not really a big deal with either distribution.

If you have a requirement for constant version numbers, then Debian
stable is recommended. If that is not a concern, I suggest trying out
Gentoo.

>   time, as one is downloading the latest source versions of stuff?

Only metadata is downloaded, not the full source. rsyncing about once
every few weeks is quite sufficient, though you need to keep an eye out
for security advisories.

> - Is there a GenToo equivalent of apt-proxy if I decide to change my
>   laptop to GenToo also?

Gentoo allows you to build your own packages and save those on disk, so
you can just install them directly.

For some reason, my experiences in the few times I have used Debian have
always been on the slightly negative side. Mostly with Debian specific
patches being installed on the system which I was unfamiliar with.

I started with RH, so RPMs were obviously familiar. I then moved to
FreeBSD, and found that a pleasanter experience. Gentoo administration
reminds me in many ways of the convinience and elegance of FreeBSD.

(My current system started life as Redhat 7.3, but it has morphed to an
extremely customised system over a couple of years, running stuff that
is far more bleeding edge than Gentoo is some cases, and extremely
ancient in others).

Devdas Bhagat