Date: Wed, 08 May 2002 17:14:45 -0700 From: rob <rob@pythonemproject.com> To: "chat@freebsd.org" <chat@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Finally a Linux with a ports collection Message-ID: <3CD9BF75.12A0E431@pythonemproject.com> References: <3CD9354E.41CBCEF6@pythonemproject.com> <20020508164424.H30997@lpt.ens.fr>
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Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > > 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 Thanks Rahul for all the info. The acid test will be whether Gnome works right. On FreeBSD it is perfect as far as I can tell. On SuSE 7.3, every time I hit the "m" key in any application I got a menu. Plus their mailing list used to be fun and helpful, but now seems arrogant. I guess thats what happens when these Linux companies go public :) Rob. -- ----------------------------- The Numeric Python EM Project www.pythonemproject.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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