What's the point of using Gentoo if you can't easily build HEAD/devel (trunk/master release from git/svn/whatever) of the software you want to install? Why bother to build the packages yourself at all?
>Muh performance/disk space matters more It's pretty much irrelevant to most users. Computer parts are cheap. Not even the people who actually care about, and directly benefit from, I/O and storage optimization (Google, Facebook, Netflix, Apple, Microsoft) care enough to install Gentoo.
In the embedded space, people are much more likely to use OpenWRT, LEDE, VxWorks or NetBSD (several of which you are also streamlined to build from source, but are arguably much easier to work with for embedded use cases).
>It isn't a package manager's job to install the HEAD/devel branch because a source tree on github isn't a package. That's irrelevant to the end user. End users use package managers to install software. They don't care about the technical details of exactly how the software is wrapped up and shipped to them. The entire point of a package manager is to abstract this process.
Building from source every time isn't a solution because it often requires reading the github page for each project and configuring the build environment accordingly, including resolving dependencies. That's a huge hassle to maintain, especially when you will likely need to build the HEAD/devel version of a number of the target software's dependencies.
Homebrew for macOS at least does this partway with brew install --HEAD. You have to manually upgrade each package instead of using "brew upgrade" as you can with normal packages, and packages aren't automatically rebuilt when dependencies change. For example, if I build ffmpeg and mpv, when h265 changes I have to rebuild ffmpeg and mpv manually.
At least if Gentoo streamlined the process of working with the HEAD/devel branches it would have a tangible benefit for developers. Why hasn't anyone bothered? What's the point of Gentoo?
>advanced stuff is irrelevant to most users wow, get this guy a PhD
Ayden Roberts
install sourcemage
Samuel Smith
Ebuilds work with everything. The default ebuilds provided by Gentoo are mostly source-based because they allow more customizabilty. Gentoo users could team up and provide a binary overlay if they wanted to.
Wyatt Hughes
I am sure you can write an ebuild that pull software from a git repo and builds it locally like any other package their retarded sandboxing method using an LD_PRELOADed library is painful though (it fucking breaks asan, for example)
Charles Anderson
Install Funtoo
Carter Perez
> totally not a meme
Sebastian Lee
Here's something written by a ex Sun employee in 2015 about Gentoo.
He seems to like it, but as someone brought up in the comments, if having granular control over your OS with bleeding edge software is important, why not just use Arch? You don't have to compile every program and you also get access to the ABS, so that means (often) more packages to install. He said he hasn't used Arch, but that in addition to optimization improvements, he might want to explicitly not install a certain feature (presumably for security reasons, as his example is heartbeat support in OpenSSL).
How much more security or performance can or security can Gentoo hope to provide? The folk wisdom seems to be that building from source improves performance, on average, by 1-3%. Also, even the Debian packages for OpenSSL were patched for the Heartbleed vulnerability essentially overnight.
I'm genuinely curious as to why people choose to use Gentoo, and why developer support isn't a major priority for it. To me at least, and I'm sure to a lot of others, that's the number one practical use case for building your software from source.
But they don't. There has to be a reason for that. Anyway I'm more concerned with why they wouldn't support the use case of a developer wanting to, for instance, write a bot to automatically build the software in the source tree every so often to isolate compile-time errors, or test basic functionality, etc. It may also help them integrate with new features or changes that will break backward-compatibility upstream.
That seems like a really kickass feature that real developers might be interested in, but instead they have seemingly focused on this weird niche that dictates that software must be built whenever possible on principle, even when there is no tangible benefit, even when doing so is a defiant act of proverbially shooting oneself in the foot. That might make sense if they were Free Software nuts, I guess, but they even allow proprietary blobs in their repositories. So what's the point? What am I missing?
Carson Green
I like being able to compile all of my software with a hardening wrapper and customize my kernel.
>how much more security can gentoo provide? Hardened Gentoo Project. It features: Hardened toolchain Pax kernel Grsecurity SELinux or RSBAC instead of SELinux
In addition to that, with USE flags you compile only functionality you need, and less code == less vulnerability coverage. Moreover, some packages have extra security features that can cost some performance if compiled in. You never know if maintainers of your distribution enabled those features.
There is no single distribution that has that many security features.
Liam Turner
With the recent GRSec disaster Fedora is exactly the same (SELinux).
Brayden Cruz
They do. I have just written an ebuild that fetches intellij IDEA IDE directly from jetbrains website. I can now install it as a usual package. Ebuilds can handle git just as easy.
Lincoln Thompson
That's interesting, although it would be nicer if you didn't have to do it on a per-package basis. e.g., if I wanted to build everything on HEAD from linux on up, it would be useful to use a specific flag for that.
It seems like ebuilds are pretty easy. One use case I hadn't thought about is arbitrarily adding software that isn't really supported in other distros. You wouldn't have to necessarily "maintain" it in the same way the AUR packages need a maintainer to build and upload new packages to the repo.
What are the merits of OpenRC? Is it really worth moving to Gentoo for?
>There is no single distribution that has that many security features. It certainly provides more security theoretically speaking. But in reality, how much security is that? Why aren't people in industry using it? Have there been any significant security compromises that have affected other linux installations but didn't affect gentoo due to these security features?
William Sanders
Control over dependencies through USE flags. No issues whatsoever with incompatible dependencies, since you can just revdep-rebuild. Compiling additional packages from scratch is trivial, since everything required to do it is already in the system. Making and distributing your own ebuild is easy and doesn't require you to have a build environment, or a machine for packaging. Apart from distro-specific reasons above, Gentoo gives a lot of freedom of choice, and has very sensible default configs. Also, your post is retarded, nobody is insane enough to build packages for actual use from HEAD, you just use source tarballs of versioned releases.
Chase Lee
>Also, your post is retarded, nobody is insane enough to build packages for actual use from HEAD, you just use source tarballs of versioned releases.
I've done it for several packages and code maintainers have even requested that I build from HEAD for testing purposes or as a solution to certain issues. Different projects have different release cycles. In homebrew it's essentially left up to the user to decide what's best for them.
I agree, HEAD builds aren't something you want to run in production unless you have good reason to. However, there are good reasons to. One of those reasons, and the reason I'm trying to focus most on here, is as a tool for developers.
Joshua Taylor
>What are the merits of OpenRC? For me the main benefits were that it doesn't use journald (horrible binary logging format and doesn't obey my delete after settings) and systemd seems like it has a lot of CVEs.
The bizarre design of systemd has already been discussed to death and is a more philosophical reason to go to OpenRC.
You can get OpenRC on other distros, so I wouldn't recommend installing gentoo for it.
Andrew Moore
CLOVEROS IS THE BEST FUCKING OPERATING SYSTEM. GUYS LOOK, LOOK AT MY SHITTY DESKTOP!!! STAR MY FUCKING REPO!!!!!!!!!!!! WAAAAAAAAAAAAH
Daniel Morris
for what purpose
Jeremiah Adams
Just install Gentoo faggot.
Eli Parker
>What's the point of using Gentoo if you can't easily build HEAD/devel (trunk/master release from git/svn/whatever) of the software you want to install? what are you talking about? of course you can do that easily
Jordan Evans
Use the -9999 builds, retard.
Austin Peterson
i only like gentoo because it's one of the most BSD-like distros
>What's the point of Gentoo? Install it and find out
Liam Ross
9999 versions are indeed live versions that fetch from a repository instead of downloading a snapshot or a tarball; they are used by developers to see if future versions might break the ebuild or the resulting installation, so they can use the 9999 versions to test it in advance. For users, it is for those that want to either go extremely bleeding edge (the newest of the newest, unreleased) or want to test whether upstream has already fixed a certain bug.
In short: If you don't need them and thus don't want to test out the newest features and fixes that are still in development, don't use them.
Mason Morgan
>USE flags This. Don't need GUI for a server? Don't litter your system with the dependencies and their dependencies.
And the less code thing is very real. We run a grossly outdated LAMP stack against the Internet and have dodged pretty much every CVE as they relied on obscure features we disabled at compile time.
Nolan Bell
>he took a meme too seriously We did it leddit xd
Easton Peterson
Are there more packages available? The repo seems really sparse, even compared to debian, and some of it is pretty outdated. Are people seriously just writing their own ebuilds for every piece of software they need to install and never updating the main repos?
William Cruz
The best reason can be summed up in one USE flag, -systemd
Michael Williams
...
James Ward
sparse how? there are official and unofficial overlays too, and if all else fails you can add your own overlay with ebuilds for stuff you can not find elsewhere
ebuilds do not necessarily have to be written from scratch
