gentoo takes just too much time to maintain and keep up-to-date, especially if you have other things to do. i’m using linux for software development and simply can’t afford to waste hours updating/fixing the system every week.

if something breaks and you need to reinstall everything from scratch, that might take hours if not days - now imagine you have something urgent to do…

alex

Upgrading is a breeze. The system is optimized for !686 hardware and will not run on anything older than a Pentium III - but that’s fine for my needs.

If you looking for a new disto, you should check this one out.

Chris….

I am planning to benchmark MySQL so I can figure out how to properly compile it. All I need to do is set up a non-production machine for that.

Gentoo is a meta-distribution. That is, it is NOT a distribution. When somebody installs Gentoo, emerges some packages, runs some apps and gets the experience, he or she is not dealing with the Gentoo Linux distribution. They are dealing with the distribution they just created for themselves from Gentoo.

I see only 2 issues in the post that are truly Gentoo related:

How to install exactly what I want from MySQL? If Gentoo does not provide exactly what you want, then you are likely the first one who wants that. Just create your own ebuilt in an overlay and submit it to Gentoo. If you cannot, submit a bug. It may be a good idea to split MySQL into client, server, and admin ebuilds, maybe not.

Properly compiled packages are slower than binary packages from the vendor. It is VERY interesting. The binaries have been compiled from different source, or there are some hidden defines, or a much better compiler than GCC has been used. You should have filed a bug or, better, ask MySQL how you should compile their source!

All the rest is just the “I found I need help to figure out how to do … properly” stuff. The author assumes he is using a distribution that should iron out all the issues for him. If it were the case, these complaints would be justified. Unfortunately, he is building a distribution himself and should compare his experience to that of the Red Hat or Mandriva development teams, not their end users. Gentoo allows an individual to compete against large companies and I find that amazing, but there is a price to pay.

The “stable release cycles” complaint deserves separate treatment. Being a meta distribution, Gentoo does not need any release cycles, period. It is actually a request for another distribution, presumably Gentoo based, that will have release cycles.

My point is that there are only 2 reasons to use Gentoo: the need to know what exactly is in the system, and the need and ABILITY to build a distribution that suits you better then any other. Any Gentoo reviewer should have that in mind.

Now, what are my thoughts about “using it for MySQL servers”? Use if you need it. Use if you can. You will get better mileage if you cooperate with other people who want “MySQL servers” and derive your specialized distribution from Gentoo.

As one of the reader earlier posted…why would you want to fix it if it aint broken? To get all the packages you want ‘will’ take several days but once you have things working…updating few things here n there/ maintaining it is a dream… Until you decide after 3 yrs that you want to do a clean install…which you should do…even if your system was perfectly maintained

Stating the above … I spent my whole weekend setting up MythTV , Raid and fresh gentoo installs on my 2 AMDs

I’ve re-added the “–enable-local-infile” option when building.
There is now a use.local.desc for dev-db/mysql* that explain a bit better what it does for mysql. Not using a clientonly flag is not an option as it has been discussed often before.

If upstream split out a client only package, instead to force a full download and as 5.0.30 a full /build/ of the server, that is discarded at the end than there would be a different ebuild only for that.

In reply to:

It sounds like you’re actually cautioning against using any hardware-specific optimizations, which I thought was one of the main reasons many people gravitate to Gentoo? (Granted, there are always the Gentoo Ricers, whom I can’t take seriously either).

Gentoo developers ALWAYS cautions against using dangerous CFLAGS, they generally bring low speed enhancement and big pain. We simply leave you the ability to do so but then you need to take care of the result.

There are a whole world of things that gentoo make faster, do you need to apply a patch, build with some thing more, or in the case of mysql add a storage engine? You simply copy the original in an overlay, create digests and re-emerge, it’s question of minutes, ever tryed to rebuild apache + php in a whatever binary distro? then you know what I’m saying.

By the way I’ve switched from suse to gentoo because when I needed to install MySQL on a dual opteron 246 it was the only distro that permitted me to do that, others were plain too instable.

Going back on fixing bugs now.

by the way, that should have been “chmod ug+x’-ing” the respective rc scripts (to enable daemons to run)…

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ARTICLE!

I am a very happy Slackware user who is actually completely satisfied with this distro, but purely out of curiousity have always been tempted to try out Gentoo. I was very apprehensive that living in Gentoo _might_ end up being the nightmare you describe and while I have been reading similar comments about Gentoo before, I was thinking maybe the Gentoo fans who dismissed such posts still knew what they were talking about.

Your blog post was the nail in the coffin though… Like you and so many others out there, I’m a “don’t make me do all this work, my time is scarce person” and can barely afford to get sucked into configuration timesinks (something which anyone dabbling in Linux is all too familiar with). While such tweaking does bring with it the control, power and knowledge that again, anyone dabbling in Linux is well aware off, often times it is just too overwhelming.

So why, someone might ask, do I use Slackware which is viewed as “outdated” and does not even have automated dependency checking? The truth is that Slackware does keep pace with the latest packages, figuring dependencies out yourself is kind of fun and *very* educational, and once you are over the learning curve, actually getting things done in Slackware is a real breeze. Another side benefit of the Slackware learning curve is that majority of the stuff you need to learn are not Slackware specific but are actually how all Linux systems work under the hood. (For example, Slackware does not include a firewall front-end, you have to learn to set up iptables yourself, but such knowledge can be applied to ANY distro out there, can’t say the same for the intricate portage system, for example).

Here are my tips for Slackware heaven:

* Don’t be anal, don’t prune by the package, use rough grained Slackware package series installs. This means a lot less headaches. I usually just do a full install. The 3-4 GB it takes up is not such a liability and the truth is that the full install make little difference in the daemons that end up running. A ps -ax will confirm that it’s still mostly the same small set that gives Slackware its reputation for good security. The other daemons will be in a quiescent state, waiting for easy enabling by just chmod a-x’ing their respective rc scripts. You will also now have most of the recent versions of important, widely used libraries already in your system such that if you install something new, the number of unsatisfied dependencies is greatly lessened.

* If you want an optimized binary compile of a package or need something that is not included with Slackware, make your own packages from .tar.gz source. Like a lot of things in Slackware, it was hard to figure out at first, but actually quite easy if you have someone to show you how. I wrote a package
tutorial here. Nowadays, 99.9% of ./configure scripts can be expected to work correctly, so it’s not painful at all to get the vanilla .tar.gz’s and compile from source into your own binary package. Plus there’s always linuxpackages.net if you’re lazy.

* For the seasoned Linux user, a package’s required libraries are easily figured out from its README. I find that even for stuff that’s fairly specialized and not included with Slackware, you usually just have to get just a couple more additional libraries to get things working the way you want.

On the other hand there is something in Gentoo that keeps me sticking with it. Sure, it leaves *a lot* for the user to handle. On the other hand, you google “gentoo <task-to-do>” and most likely you’ll receive a link to Gentoo’s wiki. In a while you’ll have the task done.

There is also something that simply makes your gentoo box feel personal. And I love the feeling.