Re: Distributions
On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 2:11 AM, Chris Walters <cjw2004d@comcast.net> wrote:
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> Ivan Savcic wrote:
> | Sorry for that personal message, I misclicked. It wasn't aimed at you
> | specifically.
>
> Apology accepted. I am sure most everyone, myself included, has made
> similar
> mistakes.
Thanks.
> | When Debian Etch was released, I wanted to give Debian a shot again in
> | some server scenarios, because of it's stability, security and ease of
> | upgrading. I now deeply respect the concept of "stable", having been
> | through security-through-bleeding-edge concept of Gentoo, for example.
> | Long End of Life of stable Debian seems priceless. Yet, on the other
> | hand, Backports filled the gap caused by some oldish packages and in
> | general there are a lot of packages for people to use.
>
> I remember the days of Sarge. I used backports then, as well as compiling
> source. Why? Is it that I have a lot of time on my hands? No. It is/was
> to
> streamline the package, and optimize it for my processor. The main problem
> with precompiled distros, IMHO, is that because the packages, especially
> the
> kernel, have to run on a multitude of different systems, they tend to be
> larger
> and slower than if you compile those packages, optimized for your system.
Luckily, there are AMD64 and IA64 flavors of Debian. Shame there
aren't (stable?) versions for i686, Athlon and P3/P4.
> | I now perceive myself back in those days as a person who wanted to try
> | a lot of things for no specific reason. I wanted faster apps (ricer,
> | eh), more apps, more eye candy... Now, when I administer several *NIX
> | servers on a daily basis, I want stable stuff, in all meanings of the
> | word. Stable filesystem, stable kernel, stable services, to name a
> | few.
>
> All GNU/Linux distros I've tried use the same basic kernel (where support
> for
> the filesystems is built), and have the same basic GNU/Linux services. So
> you
> can have that stability with virtually any distro. In my experience, the
> compile options used to compile the kernel, the filesystem tools, etc. is
> what
> determines whether it will be stable. Sometimes, the kernel version itself
> will make a system unstable. For example, having kernel compile options
> set
> that your computer doesn't support can make the resulting system unstable.
True. Sometimes it's the combination of all of that. When you're
compiling everything from source, you basically make your own, unique
distro, with your preferences and optimizations and with yourself as
the first and perhaps the only tester. Is this a Good Thing? Dunno...
Sometimes this bit me in the ass. That "distribution" of yours isn't
tested as good as a precompiled, binary distro, so there is more
chance something can go wrong.
> | So to wrap this long rant up, less people use Debian? Who cares!
> | People who use it *know* why they use it. Why try to "sell" a distro
> | to people who are still impressed by CFLAGS and a ton of eye-candy?
> | That extra 1% of performance, but occasional crashes? Who tweak their
> | systems all day long, but are doing essentially nothing?
>
> So you are saying that there is only *one* good distro, and only *one*
> correct
> way of doing things (your way)? People choose different distributions
> according to their needs. I am a programmer, so I choose to use source
> packages, and to carefully configure and compile the kernel. I choose
> source
> packages no matter what distro I am using at the moment. I don't care
> about
> "eye-candy", I care about performance and reliability. Often I find that,
> by
> default, certain drivers that would speed up my system and make it more
> stable,
> are disabled. Oh, and one more thing - there is definitely more than a 1%
> speed difference doing it that way, you just have to understand what the
> various flags do.
No Chris, I agree there is more than one way to do it. ;) But this
works for me. And I agree that with certain applications you get more
of a speed boost by optimizing them further than they are in the
binary version included with the distribution. I remember one of those
apps is the LAME encoder, which gains 50-100% boost if optimized for
P4/Athlon on corresponding machines, compared to "vanilla" i386
version. But in my line of business, squeezing out that ~1% (even,
say, 15%) in services on a server with decent hardware with medium
load trends, speed of execution isn't *that* crucial and is simply of
less importance.
I didn't say nor imply that there is only *one* distro and only *one*
way of doing things, but this is one distro and one way of doing
things that do the job for me, personally, after years of trying out
this and that.
I think that the most of the goals Debian set are correct and they
obviously gathered quite a movement around them and "popularity" isn't
a good reason on it's own to change a bunch of things just to attain
more of it. Is that elitism?
While we're on the topic, can anyone sum it up, what do people
generally think is "bad" with Debian?
Ivan
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