Development Gentoo for developers [LWN.net]

Development Gentoo for developers

Posted Nov 15, 2007 13:57 UTC (Thu) by pbardet (guest, #22762)
Parent article: Development Gentoo for developers

"Gentoo has 12,037 packages in its main repository as of this writing, which puts it among the
largest package collections. A quick check of my Fedora CVS checkout revealed roughly 5,200
packages, to put this in perspective."


I'm not sure the number of package is a good indication of the collection size. If I remember
right, at some point, gentoo started to cut xorg in hundreds of packages. The same happened to
kde. Last time I checked, Ubuntu had about a dozen of packages for each of these piece of
software.

I also know gentoo dropped xmms way before (nov-dec 2006) Ubuntu did (just did it in 7.10).

Gentoo has a lot of advantages, but let's not get carried away by the number of packages. On
top of that, if half of the packages stay in ~arch because of a lack of developpers, it
doesn't help much.

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Development Gentoo for developers

Posted Nov 15, 2007 15:56 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

the same thing cuts the other way.

gentoo doesn't have a bunch of different packages for one software release like some other
distros do (how many different nagios packages does each distro have for example, I've seen
close to a dozen on some distros, depending on if they used flat files, MySQL, Postgres, etc)

Development Gentoo for developers

Posted Nov 15, 2007 17:40 UTC (Thu) by dirtyepic (subscriber, #30178) [Link]

True, but while (for random example) Debian has libwxgtk2.4-1, libwxgtk2.4-1-contrib,
libwxgtk2.4-contrib, libwxgtk2.4-contrib-dev, libwxgtk2.4-dbg, libwxgtk2.4-dev, libwxgtk2.6-0,
libwxgtk2.6-dbg, and libwxgtk2.6-dev, Gentoo has one package, x11-libs/wxGTK.

Packages that never leave ~arch have little to do with lack of developers (though that is
something we need to improve on).  All it takes is a user request to have the package stabled
on their architecture.  The stabilizing process is handled by architecture groups rather than
the package's maintainer, and so isn't held up in the case the maintainer is MIA.