[Techtalk] Debian versus GenToo

[Dan Shearer]

On Sun, Sep 19, 2004 at 09:32:39AM +1000, Kathryn Andersen wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 18, 2004 at 10:55:00AM -0400, Marize Pommot-Maia wrote:
> > You may want to read this thread on the gentoo-users list:
> > http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/98856
> 
> Thanks.  Will look and ponder.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who's responded so far...
> Still not sure what the best thing is.

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.

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.


-- 
Dan Shearer
dan at shearer.org