[mythtv-users] Distro of choice?

[Shawn Willden]

Craig Partin wrote:

>I'm not a portage expert by any means, but I believe this could be
>easily done.  You would have to build custom ebuild files for your dev
>packages.  Once the ebuild file (a glorified shell script) was working
>to your satisfaction, upgrades would be trivial.  You can keep custom
>ebuilds is a seperate location so that emerge sync doesn't clobber
>them and then choose from your ebuild or the standard depending on
>your needs.
>  
>

That sounds like too much work for me; my Debian solution is much less 
effort.  Actually it wouldn't take much work to write myself a "build 
world" script:  Just use "dpkg -l" to get a list of all packages on the 
system, use "apt-get source -b" to build them all, then install all of 
the debs.  With a tiny bit more work, it could be smart enough skip 
packages that have up-to-date source-built versions, and to remove 
out-of-date versions.  Add a cron job to start the daily build process 
at 10pm or so... It'd be easy to have it automatically generate and 
apply patches, too.

Hmmm... I might have to look into that.  That sounds easier than what 
you mention, because I'd only have to write one script for everything, 
rather than modify one per package.

Now that I've come up with this idea, I need to go look if someone has 
already implemented it as an apt-gettable package... odds are they have.

>2% faster is still faster :) 
>  
>

:-)

>I started with pretty low end hardware and needed all the efficiency I
>could get.
>

Actually, in all seriousness, nearly all of the performance improvements 
you see from processor-specific optimizations come from a tiny handful 
of packages.  You can get about as much performance out of Debian as 
Gentoo just by rebuilding glibc.

I think that the biggest reason Gentoo boxes seem faster has little to 
do with such optimizations and everything to do with the fact that 
Gentoo users tend to install less software.  Having to wait for 
everything to build enforces a little discipline :-)

    Shawn.