On Wed, Feb 04, 2009 at 08:58:23AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Wednesday 04 February 2009 01:48:34 Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
> > So all in all, I agree.  Using Gentoo is nowadays not so much a matter
> > of performance optimization but of better control of how to build the
> > packages and the rolling release nature (I'm tired of major updates
> > every 6 months in the majority of binary distros.)  I also like the USE
> > flags which let me chose how to build something and get rid of
> > dependencies I don't need.  Administrative features like dispatch-conf
> > are also very useful.
> 
> This is the main benefit of Gentoo for me. I have to use SuSE or RHEL at work 
> for the database machines - Sybase will not support any other other distro - 
> and the 1G+ base install from those distros drive me nuts. Contrast that with 
> the DNS caches which run FreeBSD, the difference is about a factor of 5 if 
> not more.
> 
> I also get sick and tired of installing postfix on a database machine purely 
> to send nagios alerts, and watching the distro "helpfully" want to pull in 
> PostgreSQL, MySQL, LDAP, SASL, Courier and some fancy MTA-switcher thingy. 
> All because the maintainer enables those features and now I gotta have them.
> 
> No thanks. Rather give me USE so I say what goes on the box.
> 
> -- 
> alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
>

Often on gentoo related IRC chanels comes someone who asks why his
firefox-bin (or openoffice-bin or *-bin) runs faster than his
built-from-source firefox.

Usually chan's gurus answer that upstream packagers use all the possible
compiler optimizations (CFLAGS LDFLAGS etc.) for the given package,
while the average gentoo users keeps a set of "system wide very safe
optimizations" that are good for most packages, but not the best for
every particolar package.

Is that statement correct? 

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