[plug] Distro Day !!!

[Scott Middleton]

Hi All
The first computer is here. The rest are coming tomorrow.

On Sun, 2003-07-06 at 19:14, indy at THE-TECH.MIT.EDU wrote:
> 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
-- 
Scott Middleton <scott at linuxit.com.au>
Linux Information Technology