Gentoo Package Management with Portage [LWN.net]

Gentoo Package Management with Portage

Posted Jun 17, 2004 9:21 UTC (Thu) by job (subscriber, #670)
Parent article: Gentoo Package Management with Portage

I would hold LWN to higher standards. As people have pointed out, this
article containts newbie mistakes. You could have asked ONE more
experienced Gentoo Linux user to proofread it before publishing.

An article about Portage should basically cover the concept of USE flags,
the stable/unstable flag, how to clear old versions, using /etc/portage,
the files left over in tmp work and distfiles. It should then dwelve into
more advanced concepts such as how sandboxing works, what to do when it
fails, the ebuild syntax etc. I can say this and I haven't even used the
thing for a year!

When comparing with other distros I'd be more interested in how they work
in practice, how many tools there is to care about (Gentoo has a couple
too many), how upgrading works (Gentoo isn't really there yet), how
current it is kept, and so on. Your article points to Portage having
superior dependencies which simply isn't true.

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Gentoo Package Management with Portage

Posted Aug 12, 2004 18:31 UTC (Thu) by mrness (guest, #8271) [Link]

I've been a Gentoo user for more than a year and I definitely think that "Gentoo is there" where it belongs. Never had problems with upgrades or downgrades (where was the case). Well, maybe excepting my human mistakes. In any case, I don't blame Gentoo tools for that; the fault was mine.

And yes, Gentoo HAS superior dependecies. Name a single other package manager in which I could modify dependencies of a package by changing a variable (USE)! Only with source based distribution such features are possible. You don't want samba to be involved in other's packages dependency list? Simply add -samba to USE!