Patrick's playground

<unperson>He's on a crusade against paludis

Uhm, no, I'm not. I'm not on a crusade against rpm or Ubuntu either. But since I'm using Gentoo I'd really appreciate it if people didn't try to break random stuff. It's the small things, like different config file formats, different syntax for world file, different interpretation of ebuilds ... nothing serious, just the core of an installed system ... that paludis breaks.
And since some vocal people try to shove that into Gentoo with force there's resistance. Not because of the technology per se (although the size and performance of paludis would be a severe regression) but because it is not a replacement. For example a replacement keyboard might feel a bit different, softer keys here, different repeat rate there - but when I plug my old keyboard back in it still works. And that can't be said of paludis - it's designed on purpose to be just different enough (like the Office 2003 format) so that at first it looks better, but when you want to go back you're trapped. Can't open it with Office 2000. Pay 250Eur to Microsoft, now!

With that attitude, the politics instead of letting the technology speak for itself, combined with very hostile, antisocial and moody developers, I don't want that thing at the heart of a linux distribution. You can't expect a cooperative christian community when you have such an alternative anarcho-pagan community doing reinterpretations of arcane rituals just to be different. We call those people emo and goth, and if we are in the mood we point and laugh at them.

So there, that should give people something to discuss while I go do something useful. Hug a tree! Lick a toad! Enjoy life, it's much too short to be angry.

Warning: Incoherent rant follows

My benchmark series with the three Stooges ... err ... package managers and manglers ... seems to have caused quite some commotion. I'm quite amused at the large amount of "feedback", but at the same time it just reinforces every prejudice I could have had.
The first series of claims, unsurprisingly, insinuate that what I have done has somehow been manipulated. So a few other people tried to reproduce and came to interesting results:

• portage a bit slower than paludis
• paludis is the slowest

And then people tried to demonstrate that if you break your configuration in enough places paludis will continue to crawl along, portage will be a bit confused and pkgcore won't destroy your system on purpose: here
It is quite amusing then to note that paludis can barely parse a valid /etc/make.conf - but according to people that should know it that format isn't really what you should use anyway.

Quite funny to see that thread get locked. But anyways ...

rbrown> Semppe: a cursory glance would make me think that bonsaikitten believe emerge -p paludis -ip to be functional 
equivalents
Semppe> Oops, I completely missed that one. No wonder the results are a bit different. Of course he should've used at least 
emerge -uDp.
rbrown> Semppe: why? That would have invalidated the point he's trying to make

Now I still don't know how paludis would emulate portage behaviour, but this explains quite a few snipes. I'm waiting for some comparative benchmarks, but I don't expect anything relevant coming from these nice guys. Talking about nice ... (and sorry about the language)

spbecker> basically, he's a complete fucking idiot, and is using his one last position of any sort of power within gentoo for 
his anti-paludis propaganda
rane> so... adult
ferdy> so... patrick

Hmm, anti-paludis? What I did was trying paludis as a portage replacement. I looked at how easy it was to install and use, then did some comparative microbenchmarks. That I do try to keep #gentoo on topic is of course baaaad (this coming from people who never helped there, thus have no relevant input anyway) and makes them mmmmmmmmmmad. Right.
But we shouldn't bother these kids too much, reality scares them ;)
Another bit of greatness:

guja_nebeska> but if u really want me to, i'll send mail to ops.
spb> thus, we the gentoo developers reckon he shouldn't have ops there any more
guja_nebeska> for me that's 2 mins of life.
ciaranm> guja_nebeska: people have tried talking to him in person
ciaranm> guja_nebeska: we're way past that stage
Philantrop> guja_nebeska: Please do unless you're willing to travel to Switzerland. ;->
spb> unfortuantely, ops@gentoo.org are the only people who can do anything about it
ferdy> well... I won't hate you if you cockpunch him
ciaranm> he has a cock?
guja_nebeska> if i come to sui, i'll never come back to my land. so that's not such a bad idea :D
dvandyk> all i say is http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=150851#c5
ferdy> s/cockpunch/punch him in the face/
guja_nebeska> and plus, i
eroyf> guja_nebeska: really. you saw what happened to me when we started talking in there
guja_nebeska> am gonna explain to him some stuffs.
eroyf> i was banned for saying shut up because it went off topic.
guja_nebeska> yep my denmark friend.
eroyf> emailing ops@gentoo.org is really a good idea

So, uhm, where do we start? "We the gentoo developers". That's ... uhm ... spb ... and dleverton ... and Philantrop (did I miss anyone?). So, like, three persons, of which half never do anything anyway and the other half is known for their wishes to censor any ideas that are not theirs. That's about as useful as a cock-flavoured lollipop. dvandyk, a retarded and/or retired developer, reiterates his collection of half-truths, as usual. I don't have the motivation to disprove them, there's more relevant things to discuss.

So things are starting to look quite toasty. The "nice" paludis people even keep the bad vibes away:

[17:12:44] *** Mode #paludis +b *!*@gentoo/user/FamousToaster by dleverton
[17:13:11] *** Mode #paludis +b D0pamine!*@* by dleverton
[17:13:15] <-* dleverton has kicked fragalot from #paludis (bye bye)
[17:13:19] <-* dleverton has kicked D0pamine from #paludis (bye bye)
[17:13:35] *** Mode #paludis -o dleverton by dleverton

followed by

17:19 rane> i'm a gentoo developer relations project member
17:19 fragalot> Hi. :)
17:20 rane> and i want to inform you that if you continue to behave the way you did on #paludis, your  gentoo/user cloak will be 
removed

Behaving that way meaning joining the channel and saying "Hi" ? Wow, that's great. So I must really recommend to users never to go near that place as they will have firebreathing dragons on their behind within minutes.
Now, if I were a malicious person and would like to get things really toasty I would suggest filing random bugs on the paludis bugtracker, joining #paludis and saying amusing things until you get kickbanned and many other simple ideas anyone can think of easily. But that would be quite boring and silly, so I cannot support such behaviour. You really shouldn't do that!
Talking about amusing things, the forums thread mentioned above seems to have spawned a new meme that's almost worthy of lolgentoo: "poopludis". A great concise description of ... I have no idea what, but it sounds like truth in advertising. Oh, and lolgentoo has gotten a nice little retarded brother going by the name of lolflameeyes. It's not funny, but what does one expect from kids with too much time on their hand. So much poop to fling, so little laxatives in their breakfast.
So the lesson to learn is: trust noone. Take some time to learn about things and form an opinion. And once you have an opinion be prepared to reevaluate it. It can have funny results - from all the FUD-campaigns I thought that paludis would be able to compete with portage on speed, only to realize it can't even come close. If I had believed the paludis camp I wouldn't have tested speed, and I would never have gotten this nice napalm discharge going ...

Folowing yesterdays comparison of installability and usability I've decided to run a small set of benchmarks on the two package managers and the package mangler.
Setup:

• A naked stage3, untarred and waiting to be used
• One emerge --sync to get a pristine ebuild tree
• An update gcc (4.1.2) to make the mangler happy
• emerge pkgcore
• emerge paludis

That setup is pretty much in the same state I left it yesterday.
So let's just try to resolve gnome with a cold cache. For that we run "echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches" and notice that the filesystem caches have shrunk to a minimum.
Edit: forgot the exact commands. emerge -p $1, pmerge -p $1, paludis -ip $1

Times
0m30.054s; 0m29.824s; 0m15.890s
All three are wall time as measured by "time"- can you guess who is who?

Same with KDE:
0m10.285s; 0m14.402s; 0m16.949s

And now xorg-x11 plus kde plus gnome:
0m18.182s; 0m23.251s; 0m34.159s

Who is who?
Now y'all want to know who ran how fast. Ok, but it's ... unexpected. Here's the solution:
pkgcore took the first place in all three tests. It is the racecar among the package managers and manglers and has been rumored to take steroids.
portage consistently hit second place, between 25 and 100% slower than pkgcore in those benchmarks. But it keeps up very nicely for being the oldest and hardest to maintain codebase. paludis seems to be the worst choice of them all, at best barely catching up to portage, at worst being 50% slower.

Conclusion
At first I thought about methods of skewing the benchmarks if needed. Then I realized that no modifications are needed, out of the box portage is quite fast, and as expected pkgcore is faster. What really bugs me is that the paludis camp still claims that paludis is faster when all the tests I did show it consistently far far behind...
There's no reason to use anything but portage - it's very competitive, and it will only get better. And there's no reason to use paludis as it has no advantages at all for the normal user, apart from being not portage. If that is your best attribute you should reconsider your position in this universe ...

Reproducability
All benchmarks were run on a 2Ghz dualcore amd64, 4G ram, 4-disk raid5 with reiserfs, kernel 2.6.23-gentoo. The machine was not running any interfering jobs (to be more precise the mp3-player and ssh session ran all the time and caused the same bias for all benchmark runs). Everything ran in a chroot environment from a mostly pristine stage3 (updates had to be run for paludis to work).

Raw data

gnome
 
portage
real    0m29.824s
user    0m8.737s
sys     0m3.600s
 
pkgcore 
real    0m15.890s
user    0m2.056s
sys     0m0.476s
 
paludis
real    0m30.054s
user    0m11.021s
sys     0m0.684s
 
kde
 
portage 
real    0m14.402s
user    0m3.532s
sys     0m0.832s
 
pkgcore
real    0m10.285s
user    0m1.008s
sys     0m0.404s
 
paludis
real    0m16.949s
user    0m3.312s
sys     0m0.532s
 
xorg-x11 kde gnome
 
portage
real    0m23.251s
user    0m6.204s
sys     0m0.636s
 
pkgcore
real    0m18.182s
user    0m2.228s
sys     0m0.496s
 
paludis
real    0m34.159s
user    0m13.629s
sys     0m0.748s

So just to prove that it is definitely NOT a weekly Newsletter:
http://gentooexperimental.org/not-the-gwn/not-the-gwn-2008-03-30.html
Because of the season and some budget constraints parts were outsourced to Deutschland. We apologize if the nationalistic enthusiasm breaks trough in places!

Of special note should be the package manager duel, with a package mangler added for fun; the results, while mostly predictable, are still very amusing.
Jawohl, mein President!

http://www.gentooexperimental.org/not-the-gwn/not-the-gwn-2008-03-28.html

Now with extra low-calorie sweetener! Get it while it's hot! Oh wait ... hot? It's burning! Nooo! Halp!
Whew, false alarm. Look! Shiny! Wheeee!

( Ugh. Another Portage user... )
 ------------------------------
    o
     o
    ^__^         /
    (oo)\_______/  _________
    (__)\       )=(  ____|_ \_____
        ||----w |  \ \     \_____ |
        ||     ||   ||           ||

Zat is not funnay! But ze praludis prints on April 1st. Should be:

( lolgentoo! paludis pee on all! )
 ------------------------------
    o
     o
    ^__^         /
    (oo)\_______/ 
    (__)\       )
        ||----w | 
        ||     || 

So after getting really drunk at FOSDEM and sleeping off a massive hangover Not the GWN is still totally confused, but decided to publish itself.
It's the worst edition ever, lacking content, grace and style, but ... here it is:

http://www.gentooexperimental.org/not-the-gwn/not-the-gwn-current.html

Have fun ... or not? Who knows :)