[mythtv-users] Distro of choice?

Craig Partin cpartin at gmail.com
Thu Mar 10 18:15:34 UTC 2005


On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 10:42:12 -0700, Shawn Willden
<shawn-myth at willden.org> wrote:
> Michael Haan wrote:
> 
> >>The great thing is that once you have the base OS up and running its
> >>just a simple "emerge mythtv" and then the next morning your system is
> >>ready.  All the dependencies are handled automatically and it just
> >>works.
> >>
> 
> Or you could use Debian, and once you have the base OS up and running,
> it's just a simple "apt-get install mythtv", and in five minutes your
> system is ready.  All the dependencies are handled automatically and it
> just works.  Of course, it'll run 2% slower than the Gentoo build.
> 
> ;-)
> 
> (Note:  Gentoo is a fine distribution, and there are some advantages to
> it.  I just find the "then then next morning" bit to be pretty funny).
> 
> BTW, question to all you Gentoo users:
> 
> I tried Gentoo on my desktop machine a while back because I was excited
> about something I expected from Gentoo, but I went back to Debian
> because, at least the way I was doing it, Gentoo didn't do what I wanted
> it to.
> 
> What I hoped for was that I could choose to leave the source code for
> all of the software on my system lying around so that, at any moment, if
> I noticed some bug, or wanted to make some minor tweak, I could just
> jump over to the source directory, edit the code, run "make; make
> install" and have an updated version on my system in just a minute or
> two.  But that isn't how it worked for me.  Even if I left the source
> around, building a new version of a package required a complete rebuild,
> rather than just an incremental build -- if I only change one .c file, I
> really only want the system to rebuild that, and whatever binaries
> depend on that.  (Excuse me for being fuzzy on the details:  my Gentoo
> experience was about a year ago).
> 
> Obviously, doing this would mean having a huge amount of source and
> object code lying around, but disks are cheap, and it would be extemely
> nice.
> 
> Is there a way to do this with Gentoo?  Obviously, it's easy with
> something like LFS, but that requires a great deal more effort to set up
> and maintain.
> 
> I do this sort of thing with Debian all the time.  I have to do a
> complete build of a package the first time I tweak it, but every
> subsequent tweak is just an incremental make, plus a bit of additional
> work to build and install a new .deb.  However, the initial build is
> frequently enough to deter me from doing such things on big packages,
> because it'll take an hour before I can see the results of my first tweak.
> 
> What would make such a system *completely* awesome is if the emerge
> system would notice the fact that I've patched a given package manually
> when upgrading it, and attempt to reapply my patch to the new version.
> 
>     Shawn.
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> 

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.

2% faster is still faster :) 

I started with pretty low end hardware and needed all the efficiency I
could get.  Also, I think there is some stability gained with
compiling your own vs.  downloading binaries.  I am often jealous of
the binary crowd though due t the overnight thing.  Although overnight
is a compiling mysql, Qt, X, and myth and all the dependencies. 
That's a lot of code!


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