Package management in Gentoo Linux [LWN.net]

Package management in Gentoo Linux

Posted Jul 5, 2007 12:27 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989)
Parent article: Package management in Gentoo Linux

Great article.
Venerable though portage may be, the nail in its coffin is going to be benchmarking. As a paludis user, I can tell you that dependency resolution is _a lot_ faster with McCreesh's solution than with portage, and I won't hazard a guess about accuracy.

(Log in to post comments)

How painful is the migration?

Posted Jul 5, 2007 18:33 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

I have just started an emerge of paludis and will read up on it, but maybe you can answer two quickie questions?

How painful is switching to Paludis?

Is it possible to run Paludis in parallel with portage, and what is the pain level?

How painful is the migration?

Posted Jul 5, 2007 20:01 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

There is a shell script that worked great for me going portage->paludis on the paludis.pioto.org site.
I have no experience running the two in parallel, but I'll venture that you'll move away from emerge rather speedily. ;)
After switching to paludis, I installed layman, and used it to kick-start some of the overlays.gentoo.org stuff. Paludis expects more discipline, apparently, and there was some manual effort to configure, say, the emacs overlay. Had to create several files and directories to silence the error traces.
I think there is some provision for using the old-style emerge configuration files, but paludis again does a better job of herding the cats into a few coherent files.
Hats off to emerge. It had a great run.

How painful is the migration?

Posted Jul 6, 2007 0:43 UTC (Fri) by dberkholz (subscriber, #23346) [Link]

I mentioned that the latest paludis releases have compatibility with Portage config files. Try USE=portage emerge paludis, and see how things go. It should pretty much work.