[NCLUG] keeping a linux distribution up-to-date

[Matt Taggart]

"J. Paul Reed" writes...

> Having said that, I've had four friends now rant and rave about how much
> they like Gentoo and its emerge.
> 
> I've been wanting to try it, but... since it takes a good weekend to get it
> up and running... The upside to *that*, though, is I'm told everything is
> much faster when you compile it yourself (with all your CPU-specific -Os
> on).

This same arguement comes up on the Debian lists every few months.
Someone argues that Debian should have sub archs so that everything
can be built for 686 or whatever. Then people post benchmarks showing
that it's not worth the effort since the performance gain is minimal.
For the few packages where it's not, Debian maintains separate packages
that the user can choose from.

With the exception of the excuse that it's a fun hobby, I don't
understand the facination with building all your own packages. I
guess it does help to make sure that all packages build from source,
but it seems like a lot of effort for every user to go through.
Kinda the opposite of the Java quote,

"Build everywhere, run once"

-- 
Matt Taggart
matt at lackof.org