Re: [Nolug] Gentoo?

Joey Kelly <joey@joeykelly.net> writes:

> That brings up an important question: how often do things break? I don't know

That has certainly happened, especially when I decide to go with a version
of an ebuild that is considered "unstable". Gentoo masks ebuild versions
until they are considered stable for general release, but it is trivial to
choose to build unstable packages (on an individual basis).

When it has happened, though, the fixes have been very quick in coming and
I have always found the issue answered on Gentoo's web forums.

> how many times I've been in the middle of a large compile (KDE for example)
> on NetBSD and something breaks in the middle, for instance one little
> dependency that has the wrong version or build date, or a bad makefile, and
> the compile stops until I either A). waited a few days for some packager to
> fix his stuff, or B). went and grabbed the binary and pkg_added it.

Gentoo's been really good with dependencies. About as good as debian. They've
only had issues with the tough problems, such as upgrades to gcc versions
and/or perl.

Portage is really a nice package management system. I can easily mask
out newwer versions of packages as needed (which I do for my nvidia drivers
on my laptop) and do customized ebuilds (which I also do for my nvidia
drivers on my laptop). It's easy to create your own ebuilds and have your
own mini portage tree that either replaces Gentoo supplied packages or adds
your own local packages.

-- 
Scott Harney<scotth@scottharney.com>
"...and one script to rule them all."
gpg key fingerprint=7125 0BD3 8EC4 08D7 321D CEE9 F024 7DA6 0BC7 94E5
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