[mythtv-users] Distro of choice?

Shawn Willden shawn-myth at willden.org
Thu Mar 10 17:42:12 UTC 2005


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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