[plug] Distro Day !!!

[indy at THE-TECH.MIT.EDU]

Hey Bill, 
Good thoughts from you...

I've snipped out all of your mail, just to keep this one
to a manageable length.

Re: Gentoo kernel... I was thinking we would use the 
non-XFS gentoo-sources, as it seems most people
testing Gentoo against other distros choose that one.

I understand that to a point the choices we make negate
some of the "beauty of choice" in Gentoo, but this will
always be a problem with every kind of Linux. The notion
of a default install is pretty sketchy in a lot of distros.

I take on board your point about 368/586/maxOpt and thus
put on my asbestos pants and say this:

We'd like to compare Gentoo with some other distros, in
particular to think about the pros and cons of "source
compilation" vs. binary packages. 

(I'd love to do a followup that is Gentoo 386/586/maxOpt,
but that will depend on when we have to get the HW back by.)

Which distros to compare with? Given that 386/686/maxOpt
is a big part of the discussion of "the Gentoo advantage"
it makes sense to include a 386 distro and a 586 oriented
one.

We have access to 3 machines only, so we can only pick 2
distros to match against Gentoo.
I'll stick my neck out and say that the "big distros" of
the world are: Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE and Debian.

Red Hat has tweaked Gnome and KDE quite significantly
so I'd rather use Debian as an example of a 386 distro.
For 586 there is no obvious criterion to choose between
Mandrake and SuSE. We picked Mandrake out of blind prejudice.
i.e. We had more access to more Mandrake people who could help us.
Sorry SuSE users, we'll treat you better when we do a real
cross-distro comparison, I promise.

"Default install" is not only a pretty shaky concept for
Gentoo, but Debian also (someone else will have to speak for Mandrake).
Beyond the base system, I tend to install Debian by picking out
the packages individually. Thus, when I was playing with C, I had
ccache installed, whereas on my current Debian desktop I don't.

If a distro installs something "close to automatically" I guess I'd
be inclined to leave it in, even if it skews a particular test
(e.g. ccache, kernel compile) but I think we should consider running
the test with and without to be fair. To decide "close to automatically"
we'll have to come to a human judgement between the interested parties.

I'd propose that if you need to make more than a certain number of
concious decisions to use something on $Distro it's probably fair
to examine how easy it is to install on the other distros if you decided
to use it.

More discussion here I suspect.

So far, application tests proposed involve : Gimp, Gnumeric, OOo

This points to Gnome to me, although as I said, I'm agnostic on this.

I believe the machines will be Celerons, although Scott can confirm...

Compilers is an interesting point, as I wouldn't be surprised if each
distro is on a different version of Gcc to begin with, which will certainly
affect all sorts of things, but we have to accept that.

As for icc, well 2 things spring to mind... It's closed source, which
might bother some people, and the last time I looked it couldn't compile
the kernel (due to some incompatibilities with Gcc) so I think we'll have
to discuss this in the same manner as "close to automatically."

I'm half and half about icc, on the one hand to not use it would seem
to be denying Gentoo the fruits of their hard work putting it in, on the
other hand, a linux system without an open toolchain would seem to feel a
bit odd too.


comment/flame away!


Indy


-- 
Indranath Neogy
<indy at the-tech.mit.edu>