4 Apr
2005
4 Apr
'05
6:03 a.m.
Hi,
On Sun, Apr 03, 2005 at 10:08:37PM +0200, Mike Pressel wrote:
ACK, that way it's at least a match even for Debian. I haven't seen
any package management system on GNU/Linux as good as emerge (yet).
One thing though, if you don't update for a while, the next time
you do emerge, you may encounter some trouble (BTST).
That's most definitely true. I never tried LFS, which might be even
better that way. Others have pointed out other positive effects of
doing source-based installs (at least of certain packages).
For a productive environment, where you have lots of identical
hardware, you can also have one machine for emerging/testing, and
distribute the packages to the production servers. I know of at
least 1-2 companies doing this here in Luxembourg.
Greetings, Eric
-1- Does
anybody use Gentoo, and what is their experience?
I used it for a while. From my experience, the OS was very well integrated.
I was impressed how everything seemed to be set up for me automagically
whenever I installed a new program. That applied for both the Gnome and KDE
environments. I liked the speed that I got out of the boot process. Gentoo
only instals what you tell it, so you have complete control from the
beginning of what's on your system (same with Debian --- the RPM based
systems can be peared down, but that is post install). Gentoo is also the
absolute best system that I have seen for running a bleeding edge of
technology system. It doesn't have the dependency problems that RPM based
systems all seem to have. So, why don't I run it now? Well, I found it a
complete pain to download and
recompile all of KDE again, just to do a security patch. If they offered the
ability, just to download a source code patch, that might have been enough to
keep me. Case in point, I upgraded to xorg what ever version. It took
several hours to compile. less than a week later, there was an update, so I
had to wait several more hours for it to compile.
That's one of the reasons I don't run it right now, say, on my
laptop (which is the only machine anyway having approx. enough
resources to do all the compiling).
Gentoo is also somewhat sloppy (in my opinion) in
it's management of software.
Install KDE without X installed, and it can figure out exactly what needs to
be installed to get it working. But remove kde, it only removes the exact
programs that you specify. Good thing if you know what you are doing and
have the time to do all of the hand management, but if you are like me, and
really have no clue how to manage a system, you are left up a creek without a
paddle.
Exactly how would you have it do this? Install GNOME, replace by KDE,
remove GNOME and have it remove X because it was installed along with
GNOME? IMHO not a good idea. There'd also be programs from GNOME that
you'd want to keep to run from KDE or even pure X (only keep the
libs from GNOME).
I wouldn't know a single distro that'd manage this "correctly" in
your sense.
I also noticed that my free harddrive space shrank
very quickly. I
never figured out what was eating up my disk space (attribute this to
ignorance on my part).
Free harddrive space *always* shrinks quickly to a few percent of
max. capacity ;-) No need to involve Gentoo there ;-)
If Gentoo offered a binary repository with reasonable
defaults, I would
consider going back. (I'm running Debian now, and find it quite nice,
especially once you've found some of the better unofficial repositories).
Hmm... I was under the impression that indeed Gentoo offers binary
repositories.
I do also run Debian (sarge) on my desktops and laptop now, but at
least on the laptop the main reason was my need for a Debian
environment for presenting courses based on Debian, not so much
problems with Gentoo.
-2- Has
anybody really a punchy argument why source-based software
installation is useful?
If you want to learn loads about how Linux works, install Gentoo. I learned
more about Unix using Gentoo for a few months, than I had learned in several
years using SuSE.