Compiling from source

[Patrick Kirk <patrick@kirks.net>]

Hi all,

I decide to try a new distro as the win2k partition of my machine was just sitting there.  I had read articles by Daniel Robbins and decided to try Gentoo on www.gentoo.com.  cfdisk and goodbye win2k...pity in a way because I still think its the best OS ever produced by M$.  anyway, back to Gentoo.

Its a very interesting distro.  It has 2 unusual features.  Firstly, everything is compiled from source.  In /etc/ there's a make.conf where you put such optimisations as you think will suit your system and then gcc, glibc, etc. are bootstrapped followed by the distro being installed.  For this, you do need a broadband connection IMO.

Question: does this really improve performance?  

The other interesting feature is a system called portage which works by having a software map on your hard disk that you browse and then install the ones you want.  It has pretend installs, etc.  Very much influenced by BSD as the name suggests.

Now, in my sources.list I saw src type urls that I deleted to make my apt-get up#dates that little bit faster. If compiling locally does improve performance, is there a way I can use these src urls to do it within Debian?

I should add that this is not intended to start a Debian vs. whatever debate - I'm genuinely curious as to the advantages or not of compiling locally and as to how to use those src urls.

thanks in advance,

Patrick

PS - off topic here but vim is not text wrapping within mutt.  sorry its all over the place - would someone using vim with mutt please be so kind as to send me the relevant line from .muttrc to get the tw correct.