You can get the packages you need through portage most of the time. So you have to compile, what is the problem?
I've already pointed that out above, but I try to do it more precisely:
- compiling takes a lot of time
- compiling stresses your hardware a lot more than simple updates. Besides, compare the harddisk usage during emerge --sync to apt-get update.
- compiling takes too long in a normal work environment, many pc's today are not fast enough to do an install/update in a reasonable time. Even my Dual 2 Core 2 GHz processor takes two days for an install. Many updates need some manual adjustements and emerge simply stops in the middle of a nightly update. Debian takes a few ours for installation and a few minutes for updates, depending on your downstream.
I've been seriously thinking about switching to it, although I'm really used to Gentoo and I like the freedom of changing things. I've had three different desktop systems for almost 2 years, and my laptop still is Gentoo. I've switched the other systems to binary distributions like Kubuntu or OpenSuSE, because I cannot serve my parents/brother with a consistant system. Everytime I update I break someting. For me it is not a big problem to fix it or circumvent it. OpenSuSE simply works for my parents. I tried to keep a consistant system for shared nfs home directories. This needs almost the same setup, at least the same basis on all machines. If I imagine real work environments like the ones I've already seen, Gentoo is not an option. Big companies can setup a Binhost and administrate their own "distribution" on top of Gentoo, but small companies (I estimate <300 employees) cannot.
P2P isn't going to work cause people don't have patience to wait. Some don't even know what P2P is yet alone configure it, port forward and use it.
Well, most Sabayon Linux users know P2P, since they download via BitTorrent. We could provide a "wizard" for activation of automatic updates though. The background daemon would handle all P2P stuff and would integrate with portage transparently, this is my idea.
I know that this is not a simple setup and I know that we don't have the man power, but maybe we could think about a solution first and then drop it, if it's impossible to realize.
SabayonLinux needs to stay focused on the operating system and supporting it. SL needs the support of the people in order to continue development as it is.
I don't know what you mean here exactly. Nobody is talking about taking the resources away from SL. I'm just saying that Binhosts would be great, not that you stop developping Sabayon to administrate a Binhost. Of course you first need a great Sabayon setup and than distribute it...
We should be happy with what we have - it works great.
I am really happy with Sabayon and I'm thinking about switching back from OpenSuSE (Kickoff is in Sabayon before it is in SuSE, I really love that... ). In my opinion it is one of the best distributions on the planet. That's why I discuss here. I would like to fix the drawback of compilation to be able to use it everywhere
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1. miniEditions: since minis don't come with GNOME deps, we can't produce a binary package that works on both DVD edition and those ones.
We need not support them, if we don't like to. I know that this is odd, but we can focus on one supported setup first. Otherwise you can even set your make.conf to the one of the dvd and do an emerge world -uD with the Binhost, or am I wrong here?
2. we'd need a lot of extra man power.
Yes I understand this and I know that you are working and most likely you would like to have more time for your private life, too. I don't want to say you have to do it. I simply suppose that we think about solutions, if you can agree with me, that binhosts are a good thing for Sabayon.
also, we don't have a "static" make.conf, it is static when distributed, but the reason is to make a gentoo installation on a users computer. This is just to make it easier for users to get a system up and running then they can play with it.
O.k. I can get the point here. But we have a "static" CHOST and "static" CFLAGS which is most important. And Sabayon almost activates all USE-flags possible, which means, when adding new USE flags, the old setup won't be broken normally. The best thing would be to get the USE-flags for less than let's say 3 packages in the /etc/portage/package.use file. This would help to keep the base setup as consistant as possible.
Additionally the binary updates should be excactly the same as when the user types emerge world -uD. But we have to think about this point since with a Binhost we would have a releaseless distribution with all its problems (like debian unstable).
Another Option here would be to keep the Binhost packages for every release for one year ( daily updates via emerge world -uD ). After that you have to install a new Sabayon version. This approach would make Sabayon and the world updates more consistant. A mixture of releaseless and normal releases.
If you only build Sabayon as a playground for potential Gentoo users, then we can stop the discussion right here. I tried to make that clear, that first we have to admit that Sabayon is a binary distribution and not vanilla Gentoo anymore. I would say it's a "derivate". If you don't agree here and say that it's still Gentoo, then Binhosts are nonsense. In my opinion Sabayon is much better than that.
Perhaps if we grow and "emerge" into the world more and a lot of people with the same hardware and requirements, we can happily work with them to set up a binhost and such with some support
You don't need the same hardware to use binary packages, don't you? You only need the same hardware for the same system configuration...
there's always Klik. You can use klik and make things easy on yourself. Compiling from source is better though. It's made to fit your computer instead of a generic one.
Yep, it's not about Klik here. Klik is more for live cd users or users, who don't have install privileges. It is not a solid solution.
but i really wonder why gentoo.org doesnt think about such a thing. they have a lot of resources, maybe more than most of the other distributions that are not comercial based (red hat).
Because Gentoo is a source distribution, it's nonsense for them.
actually to get to the heart of the issue i think the real problem is that i think emerge can be faster. it is already very smart but i can see things that would improve it for example why not download one ebuild while another one is compiling instead of downloading them all first and then compiling. furthermore we should be able to set more processing power to it for those times when you are not on the computer for like 2 hours and want ta compile. no need to let cpu cycles and ram sit idle.
Check for parallel-fetch and priority changes to build in the background. These features are here already. You can always do nightly updates via cron jobs.
Emerge cannot accelerate compilation times. Emerge is slower than Apt for example, but you can tweak it and put the metacache in a db instead of plain files, which should accelerate emerge --sync and emerge startup times a lot.
some of these would be difficult to set up because you cant compile an app before some dependencies are taken care of but in most cases (like say if i wanted to emerge gaim and firefox at same time) it would not be a problem to have em both running simultaneously.
Compilation takes all your cpu power already. If you start several emerge processes you get a problem with memory and scheduling. This won't accelerate, but slows you down. Compilation is not a time issue but a work issue...
Finally I would like to ask you, and that's the important question, do you think that Sabayon is Gentoo or do you think Sabayon is binary customized built of Gentoo?
Cheers,
whilo
