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From: "leon j. breedt" <ljb@neverborn.ORG>
To: gentoo-dev@gentoo.org
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Portage Ported to OS X
Date: 10 Jun 2003 12:01:20 +1200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1055203280.2168.24.camel@ash> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20030604085215.GN10084@galen>

On Wed, 2003-06-04 at 20:52, Joseph Carter wrote:
> Any plans to cooperate with the fink people on this?  That might be
> getting a bit out of the realm of what's normal and expected for Gentoo,
> but I happen to think that portage is a lot better suited to building fink
> packages than anything Debian's got these days.
ah, i cannot resist responding to that jab from a developer's
perspective:

advantages of DebianStyle(R)(TM)(C):
- extensive set of tools to validate and QA packages (lintian is really
full-featured)
- picky policy on where things should go, what should always be in a
package, etc. and its documented, whereas some things are still kind of
up in the air for Gentoo, or more just guidelines...gives a consistent
feel to Debian.

disadvantages of DebianStyle(R)(TM)(C): 
- takes too long to get your head around the complete building process,
there are lots of docs and policy to take in, in more than one set of
documentation
- too many ways to set up the build process...the policy just dictates
some expected files and expected debian/rules targets, so you're free to
do it in your own way, which leads to wheel reinvention.
- ad-hoc external patch (changes outside of Debian-specific diffs)
mechanisms (dpatch, dbs, hand-rolled). dpatch requires you to create a
damn script for each external patch you want to apply (argh!!). there is
a tool to help with this, but still...
- too much legacy stuff hanging around (probably understandable, given
~8000 packages), so improvements to the package build system as a whole
are in tiny tiny increments: they're too scared of breaking backwards
compatibility for new features. NB: how is Gentoo going to handle
scaling while maintaining Portage feature increase?
- sucky kernel module building system (tried building nvidia-kernel on
Debian? heh...due to it using make-kpkg, less than intuitive compared to
'emerge nvidia-kernel')

disadvantages of ebuilds i've noticed:
- one ebuild can't generate multiple installed packages. this is why i
suppose eclasses were invented.

by no means a definitive list, but for those of you that aren't from a
Debian maintainer background, some things i ran into during my tenure.

Gentoo isn't doing all that badly, though. Debian was pretty ad-hoc in
the early days, so i'm positive for Gentoo's future.

i still use both Debian and Gentoo :)

leon


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gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list


  reply	other threads:[~2003-06-10  0:01 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 22+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2003-06-03  1:02 [gentoo-dev] Portage Ported to OS X Taylor Christopher P
2003-06-03  2:25 ` Daniel Robbins
2003-06-03 21:35   ` Pieter Van den Abeele
2003-06-03 21:42     ` Taylor Christopher P
2003-06-03 21:54       ` Pieter Van den Abeele
2003-06-03 22:07       ` Daniel Robbins
2003-06-03 22:34         ` Jon Portnoy
2003-06-03 22:38           ` Pieter Van den Abeele
2003-06-07 23:20             ` Alvaro Figueroa
2003-06-09 22:59               ` Luke-Jr
2003-06-10  2:08                 ` Taylor Christopher P
2003-06-04  0:56           ` Taylor Christopher P
2003-06-03 23:12         ` Nicholas Wourms
2003-06-04  1:16           ` Joseph Hardin
2003-06-04 15:07             ` Sascha Schwabbauer
2003-06-04 16:39               ` oford
2003-06-04 20:06                 ` Joseph Hardin
2003-06-04  8:52         ` Joseph Carter
2003-06-10  0:01           ` leon j. breedt [this message]
2003-06-10 12:47             ` Joseph Carter
     [not found]         ` <20030604082858.GE10084@galen>
2003-06-04 13:05           ` Taylor Christopher P
     [not found] <Pine.GSO.4.51.0306040902350.736@yoda.cs.clemson.edu>
2003-06-04 13:41 ` Pieter Van den Abeele

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