On Sat, 11 Oct 2003, Bob Cober wrote:

> The Portage package system is amazing.  Just type 'emerge PACKAGENAME'
> and it calculates all dependencies, downloads relevant source into the
> main code tree on your system, compiles with your specific settings, and
> installs.   For example, 'emerge mozilla ' or 'emerge xfree' and 'emerge
> xmms'.

Does "emerge" also download or update the portage tree itself too?

For example, if you want to update groff (and you are at groff-1.17) can
it automatically retrieve and use the
sys-apps/groff/groff-1.18.1-r3.ebuild specification (and the new versions
of its dependencies)?

Anyways, this is very similar to the FreeBSD and OpenBSD ports systems and
NetBSD's pkgsrc. The articles by the Gentoo founder said he based them on
the FreeBSD "ports" idea, but using python instead of pmake.

I have been using pkgsrc for Linux too for 13 months.

I am making pre-built, ready-to-use packages, so if anyone wants to try
some, let me know. (I still need to make some webpages about my Linux
distribution project.)

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://bsd.reedmedia.net/