Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo is the best linux distro

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 10 Sep 2012 14:46:14 -0700
Chris Stankevitz <chrisstankevitz@gmail.com> wrote:

> Gentoo is the best distribution I have used (I haven't used too many:
> ubuntu, fedora, gentoo).  I love the USE flags.  I love watching (and
> questioning) what is going to be installed.  I love emerge.
> Supposedly gentoo lacks being able to have a system "just work"
> without thinking about anything.  But in my experience on linux, this
> simply isn't the case anywhere.  With ubuntu, for example, I had
> trouble with sound and ethernet cards that I could never figure out...
> and the kind of answers I get on their forums drive me insane ("my
> uncle once said that his cousin typed this magical command and it
> worked fine for a little while so maybe try that").
> 
> And what's the deal with these "major release versions" of the other
> distros?  Why do that?

They are binary distros so they have no choice. For the duration of
that version's life, all the packages shipped must all work together
and that is only possible if the ABI does not change.

The major version number is a way of recording what the hell you got:
look up the distro version somewhere and see what it says.

For the release to use new packages with their new magic features,
every other package using those packages must also be recompiled and
re-released to. You know about the current level of cluelessness on the
forums, imagine what would happen if there were 6 versions of every
package for every release.


I don't mean "foo-1.2.3-ubuntu-1" vs "foo-1.2.3-ubuntu-2" (which will
always be forward and backwards compatible), I mean "foo-1.2.3" vs
"foo-2.3.4" and a few bar packages that don't use foo anymore but do
use baz.

It would be a nightmare. The only sane way to deal with this is to peg
the packages at version levels and stick with it. Windows does this,
Mac OS does it, Solaris does it. And they do it because that's the only
thing that could work.

Gentoo has no need of major version numbers. It is source-based,
so it can do rolling releases. For any new package foo that changes
it's ABI, portage will find all packages bar that now need to be
updated, and then update them. This could never possibly work for
Ubuntu. Nothing else could possibly work for Gentoo.

Often when trying to understand why Gentoo works a certain way, it
helps to remember who exactly is the distro maintainer. Ubuntu has
maintainers that build packages for their Ubuntu versions and put the
binaries in a repo somewhere. 

Gentoo also has such people: You


> 
> Thank you to all the people who contribute to it... and to those who
> are giving great advice/solutions on this list!
> 
> Chris
> 



-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com