Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Shared libraries in Gentoo

[Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de>]

* Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:

> > True. But FreeBSD isn't that popular like Windows, Mac or Linux.
> 
> So you don't work at a Tier 1 ISP then?
> 
> FreeBSD rules that space. I get hugely better performance out of Postfix on 
> FreeBSD than on Linux - all other ISPs in this country concur.

Well, not everybody is a tier-1 isp ... ;-o

BTW: one of my customers, a really big one here in Germany
(who also has several of the major free mail portals) runs
its mail systems on GNU/Linux (well, inhouse mailing is done
via Exchange+ADS, surprisingly it actually works ;-)).

But I'd really like to know what produces the performance hits
on Posfix @ Linux.
 
> In fact, portage is complete overkill and I refuse to allow it
> to be deployed at work. Check my posting history for the
> rationale behind this.

Well, portage could be much thinner if certain things would be
moved explicitly out-of-scope or solved more generic on a 
different layer. (yes, I'm explicitly ignoring the historical
issues right now ;-p).

For example:

* distro-specific and various source retrieval methods would not
  be necessary, if the packaging/distro-build system would simply
  fetch it's sources from an vcs (eg. git ;-p) using canonical
  versioning/namespace scheme [1].

* instead of useflags (the terminology implies we're switching
  things some package *uses*, not provides), model the available
  features, eg. like Briegel [2] does. (that's more a methological
  that a technical issue).

* instead of slotting, assign separate package names when multiple
  version concurrency is required (and maybe pull them together
  via virtuals)

* rely on an pure DAG as dependency graph - per definition.
  when circular dependencies occour, fix them in the source tree,
  for example splitting off certain packages in several smaller ones.


[1] http://www.metux.de/download/oss-qm/normalized_repository.pdf
[2] https://sourceforge.net/p/briegel/


Don't get me wrong, that shall not be understood as ranting against
Gentoo, just showing suitable approaches we'd start afresh on a
"green grassland" (w/o all the historical burdens).


cu
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 Enrico Weigelt, metux IT service -- http://www.metux.de/

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