Gentoo goes Binary (packages)
Gentoo goes Binary (packages)
To speed up working with slow hardware and for overall convenience, we’re now also offering binary packages for download and direct installation! For most architectures, this is limited to the core system and weekly updates - not so for amd64 and arm64 however. There we’ve got a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker. Gentoo stable, updated daily. Enjoy! And read on for more details!
Quite the statement that Gentoo has survived for so long compiling from source but, even with ever advancing processor speeds, they've finally gone "Nah... Takes to long. ".
I mean, I don't blame them. Yesterday I left my machine building a PyTorch package for 4 hours on a 12 core processor.
As a long-time Gentoo user the only packages where compile times (and RAM usage) really bother me are all the myriad of forks of that shitty Chrome browser engine (webkit-gtk, QtWebEngine, chromium,...) and LLVM and clang.
My beef tends to be with software out of FANGs. Big teams and huge codebase to match. Completely inpetetrable for the rest of us and, I suspect, far more code then there should be.
Chromium with wayland and X support is by far the greatest offender that I have found.
To think the day Gentoo goes binary would finally come...
Next: Slackware get automatic dependency resolution
I hate to be the one breaking the news, but...
Well we've had binary packages for ages for big builds like firerox and default is still to use source packages.
Still I'm really excited for this, having the whole, or big parts of the package tree, will speed up initial installations by a lot on weak arm systems for example. Now initial installation can be done quick and later you could still compile stuff yourself for the full gentoo experience.
Gentoo "purist": "Welp, Gentoo is now officially dead."
Non-gentoo user: "Welp, Gentoo is now just another Arch fork LMAO!"
Non-gentoo user: “Welp, Gentoo is now just another Arch fork LMAO!”
To be fair, you can still build packages and fine-tune the builds with the Emerge system flags, which is sort-of Gentoo's killer feature. It is just that they have recognized that most people will install probably 99% of all software without changing the default flags, and so why not give them those packages pre-built.
So I guess this make Gentoo more similar to Nix OS or Guix OS but without the high-tech package manager and dependency resolution.
Gentoo purists are fun because you can be an LFS snob to them and they can't say anything
Heretics! The true chosen use Exherbo!
(No, seriously, this is fine. And there's nothing keeping people from doing full source-based still.)
literally 2 days ago i tried installing gentoo in a vm but gave up because it would take too long to compile... and now this??? guess my timing was pretty bad
if i did use gentoo, i'd probably compile smaller programs from source and bigger things like kernel and web browser i would use as binaries.
I think this is the sign from the universe you've been waiting for!
Seems kinda pointless to compile most packages unless there are specific performance optimizations or non-default features that can be enabled. I think the way I would use this would be to do binary by default and build only on the occasional instance there is a tangible benefit.
I stopped using Gentoo because compiling everything was a major waste of time, but I have missed world files since then. This is a great reason to reconsider Gentoo for my next machine.
FWIW, Alpine Linux has a nice world file, too. And I am continually impressed by the selection of up to date packages in their Edge repos.
Can the file be split into different files like in Gentoo? I used to have different files for basic stuff, gaming, hardware specific, etc, so I could keep the parts of the Configs I wanted from one machine to another.
If so I'll definitely check it out, been meaning to try Alpine since for what I understand it's not GNU, right? Which should put a final nail in the GNU+Linux copy pasta hahahah.
Alpine Linux is the most sane distro I tried. The absence of glibc brought limitations unfortunately, but it is the fault of developers that uses that shit instead of pure libc.
I think it's a good move. It doesn't take anything away from people who want to keep compiling everything, but now people on especially old laptops can enjoy the distro too.
Though I will probably continue being a void user this makes me want to use gentoo more then it did before.
Love this change. I wonder if I can install a binary-based Gentoo distro and gradually progress from there, if I wanted to, with locally compiled packages that partially replace the binaries. I hope this is not an all-or-nothing situation, so better read the announcement.
EDIT: Hey, yes we can!
So.... Bentoo? Bintoo?
Bento 🍱
😋
Gen-toobin
The distro for white water rafters.
I've been a Gentoo user since 2004 or so and used to crosscompile binaries in like 2006 for all of my systems including some sparc and ppc builds on my main servers. It was glorious. I adore Gentoo for portage and the ability to dream up a set of OS decisions and then actually do it, dog food and all. I'll probably never not have some form of a Gentoo system within reach but mostly for nostalgic reasons but VMs and containers now fill my needs.
Good for them
Hm? Didn't they already offer binary packages for a while now?
The official binhost project has been an experimental thing until now, I've personally been using it for the year on multiple machines, but it's not been something that you can just enable. And it's definitely not been something that's come pre-prepared in the stage 3.
Good, I might try it now.
When you have more life behind you than ahead of you, time suddenly becomes precious.
Wow, when I went to bed yesterday it was only December 28, but now it is somehow already April 1!
that makes it usable! might give it a try.
Been using Gentoo on my server for over a decade now and probably won't ever leave the compiling front, especially with a 12-core/24-thread CPU making it go as quick as regular binary updates on my mint laptop... But that being said, in happy to see them considering to do this. It'll bring in some folks who are afraid of (or just dislike) compiling everything from source. I think the biggest packages that'd benefit from this are definitely the browsers and desktop environments.
I'm enthralled by this. It really makes it easier to support other people's gentoo installations while allowing one to still optimise the ever last drop of life blood out of one's own packages! Love to see it!
When Arch switching to brew as one and only package manager
That weirdly makes me wanna try it less. That was it's whole thing. It's a convenient thing tho