"How do you want to waste the day?" -- yeah it's Gentoo!

"How do you want to waste the day?" -- yeah it's Gentoo!

Posted Aug 18, 2004 19:43 UTC (Wed) by gvy (guest, #11981)
In reply to: custom installers by Duncan
Parent article: A look at Gentoo 2004.2

> Mandrake's rather excellent urpmi dependency system

Oh no, not that again.

urpmi clearly sucks -- it will eagerly plug you packages with mutual Conflicts: tags :(

Conectiva's apt port is much closer to a workable solution. ALT Linux 3 is rumoured to be dropping Mdk's installer remnants altogether and moving to total apt'ification of the process, which is a Good Thing(TM) -- fixing the guts of pixel's chedeur (especially older versions) is what drove me mad, even not being really active on that.

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On the topic of USE flags, modern package repos tend to have weighs of %def_with, %if_with and tags like that in specs so that you can rebuild a package in quite distracted manner as opposed to focused spec hacking. =)

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I personally don't like Gentoo since it drives people being closely locked up in their localhosts, hardly being able to support larger numbers of systems which is essential to lowering the costs of running the systems. Yeah, there are many factors and tweaks but somehow a person able to do the trick with source-based distro is more productive at "real tasks" with a little help from package-based power tools, and person realizing the weaknesses of pre-packaging approach is able to get around them just as easily most of the time.

It's the same reason I don't like Slackware for -- you just can't offer jobs to people spoiled by that as "The Only Distro" as you can't rely on the resulting mess to be supportable.

Gentoo is much more organized, but the idea of having C compiler and kernel headers on *production* servers just doesn't help the fact you have to administer your own package repo otherwise (or have no advantage in face of packaged solutions).

But the docs are nice, that's true. Just as the buzz and Dan's PR is.

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