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Re: Are we losing users to Gentoo?



On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 09:40, Sean Harshbarger wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 00:00, Colin Walters wrote:
> > On Wed, 2002-11-20 at 20:16, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> > > Glenn McGrath <bug1@optushome.com.au> writes:
> > > 
> > > > Supporting our users who want to compile optimised binaries from our
> > > > source packages has NOTHING TO DO WITH OFFICAL MIRROR SIZE.
> > > 
> > > True, but I advocate the really radical thing, which is to provide
> > > binaries for our users already optimized for different architectures.
> > 
> > I think this should start out as a semi-official project, like somewhere
> > on .debian.net.  If people really like it, then we could think about
> > merging it.
> 
> I agree Walters. It would be nice to have support for optimized
> binaries. IMHO it would help Debian out a lot. Having source files

The somewhat dubious performance aspect notwithstanding, as was pointed
out, the archives would grow HUGE. How many architectures would Debian
have? i[3456]86, Athlon, perhaps a few odd ones like Cyrix M2 and the
older or newer K6. MIPS is at least 5 CPUs or so, 68k, SPARC and ARM,
too. Don't know anything about the other arches, but I suspect it's
similar. So Debian should grow to more than 50 supported cpu variants?

And, again as others have said, the main advantage of Gentoo is not cpu
optimisation, but compilation with various flags - assume only
--with-ssl/--without-ssl (for many networking applications),
--with-gnome/--without-gnome (some gtk applications allow this) and
--without-x/--with-x and everything with sound for oss, alsa, esd, ... -
so this adds another thousand binary packages.

And then try reproducing bugs...


cheers
-- vbi

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