Gentoo rocks -> Debian vs. Gentoo

Tue, 23 Apr 2002 10:05:11 -0700

On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 08:17:27PM -0700, Matt Pruett wrote:
>
> Gentoo's package management is quite elegant because it is compiling the
> packages from source instead of prebuild binarys. Considering this, and
> it beeing as easy if not easyer to use than most other package
> management systems is what I find appealing.

       Now I'm pretty sure, with what experience I have with apt-get, that
you can pull down the source and build it right there if you want in Debian.
From what I've seen, the systems are exactly the same, save for the maturity.
       I was intrigued by the ability to use a package management system
that would compile source from scratch -- hey, they even said you could have
more control over your system than with other package managers (over
dependencies, etc.). After installing it, I was sorely disappointed.
emerge/ebuild/portage would, by default, compile packages the way the
original builders had intended. The only way I could find to control which
features/dependencies packages had in the ebuild/portage system was to edit
the ebuild scripts manually. Now, I don't know about you guys, but editing
50-billion ebuild scripts to make sure that one feature that several
packages "might" need to compile with isn't very convienient -- I can do
less work just by compiling the packages myself.
       For example, I wanted to install vanilla xmms, but the ebuild script
required that I have avifile and several other non-required codec libraries
installed just to do so. Now, I must admit, after looking around in the
ebuild script, I noticed that it actually does have code to determine
weather or not you have those extra libs for those extra features.
Unfortunately, the ebuild dependency checker seemed to be broken, since the
"avi?" line would always return true and build with the avifile codec (fetch
the source, check it's dependencies, etc). I eventually had to comment out
all references to avifile just to build the thing the way I wanted.
       Additionally, many of the dependencies for other packages were not
built, or did not have ebuild scripts to install them. Eg: alsa-oss-0.9.0b
exists in the ebuild system, but the packages it depends upon
(alsa-driver-0.9.0b and alsa-lib-0.9.0b) packages do not.
       Now, I'll admit that the distro is new and untested (as compared to
Debian, RedHat, etc.), is still building it's repository of ebuild scripts,
etc., but releasing a 1.0 release before the build system is mature enough
to not have fairly blatant bugs such as the above isn't exactly a good idea.
Note that I was not running the initial 1.0 release, but the _patched_
version 1.1a with the portage repository rsync'ed to the latest copy on
their servers.

--
Thomas "Mondoshawan" Tate
mondoshawan@tank.dyndns.org
http://tank.webhop.org