Is there going to be a binary for every use-flag combo?
If not then what’s the point? It would be a lot like Debian but not Debian. And Debian already exists.

There has long been binary packages for the really-long-building stuff. That makes sense. But binary for the whole thing?

Actually, I have had ideas about a binary Gentoo. But I am pretty sure they are not what is being talked about.

I was imagining a repo-tree where you can point one machine at one or more others to serve as it’s repo. They could even in turn point to others so long as all are trusted. Gentoo’s source repos would be at the bottom. Anyway, when you go to emerge something it would check whatever machines it is configured to talk to and see if they have the package already emerged AND what the use flags were. It would then download the binaries only if the use flags matched. Otherwise those computers would check whoever they talked to on down the tree.

I think it is already possible to set up a build server that creates binaries for some number of other devices. The new thing was having it check the use flags, go down the tree looking for ones that match and automatically fall back to source if none do.

Obviously trust is huge with this. You only want to include people you know.

There are differences in cpu architecture that targeted binary code shows gains. This is where Gentoo shined. In compute intensive applications is where this shows the most. Things like CFD or eloctromagnetic simulation can show gains of over 5%.

No, I’ve never thought there’s a performance reason to do so, though the recent popularity of PGO might change that…

The value is in the USE flags, that allow whole features of multiple packages to be conditionally en/dis-abled across the system. Don’t want anything to include alsa support? `-alsa` in /etc/portage/make.conf or package.use. Similarly kde, qt, jack, gtk, gnome, cups, djvu, ftp, ocaml (bindings), … the list goes on. 392 use flags that are “system wide”, and a bunch of others that are package-specific or only shared across a few packages and haven’t matriculated.

Also, package slotting is great.

And deep-dependency updates and the requisite rebuilds all the way up the stack if something bad happens.

The idea that building from source is about `-O7 -finsane` gcc flags is really not where it’s at, no matter how much the fanboys may beleat.

I ran Gentoo as my primary OS from Dec 2001 through about a year ago when I got a new System-76 laptop running Pop!_OS (an Ubuntu spin off). The only reason I switched is that the laptop came with Linux pre-installed and I thought I would try it…

At this point I am having *so many* issues with the window manager crashing that I am *seriously* looking at ditching Pop!_OS and replacing it back with Gentoo. The reason I run Gentoo is not only to squeeze performance from old hardware, but to also give me explicit control over the dependency chain. It is trivial for me to unmask, or mask, individual ebuilds and have explicit version control. Writing my own portage ebuilds, I can also patch source code to fix problems I run into, or install projects not in the main tree (including the stuff I write myself). It also gives me more information and control over when to update critical pieces of the OS and my development tool chains, so that I can choose to update the compiler from gcc-12.3 to gcc-13.0 (or wait until 13.1 comes out, and if I do not like it, switch back by masking…)

I will also add that I have found setting up Gentoo on a new machine a bit of a pain, but once it is set up I can sync my portage trees daily, and keep everything up to date for several years at a time. I have also been able to update the system live, and only need to reboot the servers when needing to update the OS, or a few key services.

So I am a long time Gentoo guy, and miss not having it now…

Debbie and Ian probably had their best time here in town whilst he cranked out the code before they went west.

Nan not Debian, it’s NixOS which has the biggest and fresher package list accordingly to Repology (https://repology.org/repositories/graphs). Also IMHO, Nix or Guix are the game changers in distros world these last years…

I might try “adiabatic” next…