[Techtalk] Debian versus GenToo

[Kathryn Andersen]

On Mon, Sep 20, 2004 at 10:59:34PM +0930, Dan Shearer wrote:
> Then maybe the best thing might be to run some test systems you fully
> expect to end up a complete mess. It doesn't have to take much time to
> try a distro if you know you don't care about poor installations.

Alas, I don't have my PC set up for installing random distros on.  I'd
have to repartion it to get some space free for it...
 
> As to bandwidth requirements, a handy piece of theory to know is that
> updating a binary distro is something rsync can't help with much,
> whereas a source-based distro should be able to get most of the rsync
> benefits. This is because binary packages are compressed, and
> re-compressing a file results in an entirely different file even if tghe
> contents were only changed slightly. There are tricks around this (eg
> the rsync-friendly gzip) but that's the general story with the rpm and
> deb-based distros which gobbler bandwidth when used with tools such as
> apt-get.

Thank you!  This was the kind of thing I wanted to know.

What I gather from the referred thread is that
- GenToo has less packages than Debian, but still more than other
  distros like RedHat.
  (Whether that affects me would basically depend on which packages
   were missing from GenToo -- if they were all things I didn't
   use anyway, then no problem)
- GenToo takes longer to install things (because they have to be
  compiled) (pretty obvious)
- GenToo is harder to install initially, but just as easy to maintain
  (X may be the hardest to set up, but if I'm installing it on my
  existing PC, then I would expect I could just take my existing X config
  file and not have any problems)
- GenToo can be compared with Debian/unstable but likely not to have
  dependency breaks because compiling from source is more flexible
  in that regard than using precompiled binaries

What I don't understand is why people seem to assume that Debian/testing
doesn't exist -- the comparisons always seem to be between stable and
unstable...

Another question: if I do find that there's a desired package which
isn't in GenToo, what would be my best course of action?

Kathryn Andersen
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