[mythtv-users] Which Distribution?

[Rob Hillis]

Scott Alfter wrote:

>On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 11:18:03AM -0500, Craig Partin top-posted (grr):
>  
>
>>I use Gentoo.  Aside from being a nice distro generally, it handles
>>the dependencies well for mythtv.  The portage system is killer.  Once
>>you have a stable base, you just type "emerge mythtv" then wait for
>>three days. ;)
>>
>>Downside is compiling everything manually takes forever.  
>>    
>>
>When you use Gentoo, distcc is your friend.
>
...but can also be your worst enemy.  I've found that DistCC is 
responsible for an inordinate number of compile fails which is really 
annoying when you start a compile then go to bed, only to find out that 
the compile stopped fifteen minutes after it started because a package 
doesn't handle DistCC properly.  In fact, MythTV was one of the worst 
offenders until I submitted a patch to the ebuild (shamelessly copied 
from elsewhere) not long after 0.16 came out to build the individual 
library components *first*.

In my experience, ccache is even worse... it made my life a misery after 
I moved to linux26-headers and tried to recompile everything from glibc 
back to MythTV in order to get DVB working properly again.

Of course, YMMV.  I'm quite willing to believe that I may have mucked 
something up, though my machines now compile their own software without 
the aid of ccache.  If you start a big compile - even x.org or KDE - 
before going to work or bed, if you're running a reasonably recent 
machine, it's not too bad. (says he, casting a look at the P3-500 
sitting in the corner, currently compiling kde-base after kicking off 
the install two days ago)

Gentoo is good - portage really is the killer feature of the distro, 
particularly with a system with a heap of dependencies that have 
dependencies of their own in an environment where optimisation really 
does matter and make a difference. (says he, again casting a look at the 
P3-500 sitting in the corner)  It's certainly not for everyone, however 
for MythTV, it's good enough to be right up there, just behind KnoppMyth 
(especially if you use DVB hardware) and Fedora.


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