[GEM Development] GEM on Atari

[Liam Proven]

2009/1/5 Shane Gough <goughsw at gmail.com>:
> Hi Alan,
>
> When you say 'Gentoo running on FreeMINT' what do you mean? I would
> have thought that Gentoo (being a Linux based OS) would run directly

I think Alan is getting confused, and thus confusing the rest of us.

Gentoo, as you say, is a Linux distribution: a complete OS based on
the Linux kernel.

You can't run that on MiNT. It's not possible in any useful way.

However, one of Gentoo's distinctive features is Portage, a
source-based packaging system, derived in inspiration at least from
the FreeBSD Ports system.

(The other BSDs - NetBSD and OpenBSD - use something similar. I don't
know about DragonflyBSD and PC-BSD has its own, different binary
packing system, as well as Ports.)

It may be that someone is trying to implement Portage on Mint. That
would be doable, although when I imagine the MiNT-based world is much
slower-moving than that of x86 Free software, I don't see a lot of
point.

Secondarily, the point of Portage and of Gentoo in general is to
compile from source on every machine. There are 2 reasons for this,
neither of which apply on Atari & compatible hardware:

[1] x86 PC hardware is fast enough that recompilation is quick
[2] There is such a diversity of PC hardware - CPUs alone in a dozen
families or more - that significant performance improvements can be
got from compiling with specific optimisations for each individual
machine. E.g., on Intel alone, processors include
386dx/386sx/486slc/486dx/486dx2/486dx4/Pentium 1/MMX/Pro/2/3/4/4HT/4
64-bit/4 64-bit HT/Core/Core2/Core2Quad/Atom/Core i7. That's 20
variants and I've not included 64-bit variants of everything since
Core2. Add in buses, caches, chipsets, graphics chips, choice of Linux
desktops, choice of version of GCC, choice of kernel, etc., and there
are millions of permutations of PC.

How many 68030-based ST-family machines are there? Half a dozen?

So, with a small library of software, relatively slowly changing, on a
small number of fairly fairly homogenous machines, where available
processing power is so low that compilation will take hours, there
really is no point in Portage that I can see.

A free, open, GPL, binary-based packing system with automatic
dependency resolution built in from day 1 at a deep level, though,
would be a boon. That means APT, which is all that, and runs on both
.deb packages with DPKG and .rpm packages with RPM.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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