Date: Wed, 8 May 2002 16:44:24 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> To: rob <rob@pythonemproject.com> Cc: "chat@freebsd.org" <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Finally a Linux with a ports collection Message-ID: <20020508164424.H30997@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <3CD9354E.41CBCEF6@pythonemproject.com>; from rob@pythonemproject.com on Wed, May 08, 2002 at 07:25:18AM -0700 References: <3CD9354E.41CBCEF6@pythonemproject.com>
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rob said on May 8, 2002 at 07:25:18: > I installed it last night. www.gentoo.org. Looks pretty neat. It was > too late and I haven't had a chance to play with it. I have only one > complaint so far (and it was probably my own ignorance), installing Vim > brought along with it XFree86 4.2, and the Gnome libraries. Ouch! A > very long compile, but I'll need them anyway. Rob. I've been using gentoo for 4-5 months off and on. I think it has plenty of potential. But if you look through the portage handbook, you'll see how to turn off autodependencies on gnome, kde, and other stuff you don't want (there's a "USE" variable in /etc/make.conf). Interesting ideas about gentoo: 1. Like FreeBSD, you can rebuild the entire base system with one command, but unlike FreeBSD the base system is itself a collection of ports (because, I guess, that's the way linux is...) 2. Installing a new version of a port doesn't clobber your old config files. Come to think of it, it doesn't in FreeBSD either in the examples I can think of, but I'm not sure what the mechanism is. 3. Gentoo-style ports don't require the equivalent of a pkg-plist file: they first install into some temporary directory, then generate the plist there, then merge into the final directory. This is basically the recommended way to generate pkg-plist automatically in FreeBSD, but Gentoo's system does it for you at the expense of using more disk space. I liked it because, if I wanted to install a new version of a program and the "ebuild" hadn't been updated, I just needed to edit the ebuild file to use the new version, et voila it worked. 4. To upgrade the port, you first "merge" the new version, then "unmerge" the old version. Unmerging looks at mtimes and refuses to remove files whose mtimes have changed, so only the useless files from the old version would be unmerged. 5. You can do the equivalent of "make fetch" which will fetch all the source files, not only for your required ebuild, but for its dependencies too. So you could do the downloading at work and the compiling at home, for example. 6. You can do a "pretend" merge of a gentoo port (emerge --pretend) which will show you all the ports which would be merged, without actually doing it. I'm pretty impressed with the thoroughness. Right now it still has rough edges (not surprising for a distro that's just reached 1.0) but it seems very well thought out on the whole; it's by far my linux of choice, though freebsd remains my OS of choice... Rahul To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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