Re: [PLUG] Re: why Gentoo

sean finney <seanius@seanius.net> · Mon, 18 Jul 2005 10:53:30 -0400

hi,

On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 10:26:14AM -0400, Cosmin Nicolaescu wrote:
> recompile. There are lots of packages that have -rN (int N), which
> indicates that the package has had some patches applied (usually by Gentoo
> devs). The advantage of having a source package is that all the dev has to
> do is add the patch location and tell the ebuild to apply patches on
> compile, and release the ebuild (after testing it, of course). This is
> _much_ faster than a binary release.

how exactly is this faster than a binary release?

> The problem with Debian is the package base. It has stable, and unstable,
> and testing branches, but they're all pretty old. Unstable should be as

i haven't really found this to be the case, but maybe i'm not looking
hard enough.

> packages were so old. X.org was just introduced last week (I think). Not
> to mention that if you want 1 package from unstable/testing, you have to
> switch your entire tree, which means new gcc, glibc and probably a lot
> more, to then find it almost impossible to downgrade. With gentoo, all i

i've got thick enough skin that i can shrug off a little harmless
anti-debian banter, but this is not true, so i feel compelled to step
in here.

you can easily bring in a small number of packages from a newer release
tree without switching your entire system over.  you have three steps:

- put the newer uris in your sources.list
- append APT::Default-Release "stable"; (or whatever you want as your
  base) to /etc/apt/apt.conf
- from then on do apt-get install -t testing some-package when you want
  to pull in something newer.

apt will then automatically track the testing version of the package and
upgrade it (and dependencies) as necessary.  the rest of your system
will remain as it was.  this is a very popular technique for debian
sysadmins as the stable version gets older and older.

	sean

ps - the above is documented in online manual pages as well as users
     guides off of http://www.debian.org/doc.  you can't fault debian
     for having users (and non-users) who don't read the documentation.