On Thu, 2005-03-17 at 10:09 +0800, W.Kenworthy wrote:
> I am not a dev, only a user, but who uses this stuff daily - and I can
> see big problems on the horizon with this for the average user on less
> than the fastest and latest hardware.  I mainly use gnome (but have kde
> installed), and can attest to the fact that their multi package approach
> sucks.  You get updates that fail and block other packages and you end
> up with a mixed package and broken gnome (has happened numerous times) -
> on gnome systems I keep a fluxbox (and a kde on my main desktop) install
> so I dont get caught with an unusable system.  Then there is the fact
> that updates to gentoo stable usually mean multiple gnome packages
> updated - rarely is it just one or two packages.  Gnome has only a
> fraction of the packages in kde, but the disadvantages of this from a
> user point of view are quite plain from experience.

If you stay plain stable arch and don't switch to ~arch or back you
should not ever have any problems with gnome. gnome is fine as long as
you upgrade only.

But the general concerns regarding large chuncks of ebuilds &
interdependencies with the lack of 100% dependency control in portage
(which gives rise to most gnome's problems) were also the things we told
the KDE team. We did warn them about it, a lot. Gnome was designed to be
a lot of small chunks from source, KDE just isn't. But it is their
choice, maybe it works, maybe they'll find out it's a hell anyway in
practice (updating 300 ebuilds with such a small team to begin with,
SLOTing, up/downgrading, etc.).

- foser