Re: packaging system

[James Frazer <jfrazer@xxxxxxxx>]

Emiel Kollof wrote:

>>Compiling glibc, moz, X or
>> even KDE is NO FUN on a measly PII 400.

It's worse on a p166 :-)

Eric wrote:

> The first is that the base system is tied to portage.  I really prefer
> *BSD's way of keeping system builds separate from ports.  I've got a
> couple of foot holes from working with Gentoo in this regard.  We've
> started a policy of not upgrading portage for at least 3 days after a
> new revision and many revisions have been downgraded within a day or so.

This doesn't sound so much of a problem with portage but more a problem 
of not-so-great code getting released prematurely.  I have friends who 
run Gentoo who have reportedly had the same problems though.

I personally can see benefits of being able to update the base-system 
through ports/packages.  Obviously there are some potential drawbacks to 
this -- but I think it would be a bit easier (and less cryptic) as far 
as patching and updating the system is concerned.

Let me just give you an example -- the silly OpenSSH holes -- updating 
OpenSSH was a little silly -- seeing as how OpenSSH is included in base 
AND in the ports.  You could install the new version via the port but 
then you would have to uninstall the version in base.  Unless you wanna 
cvsup an update to the system sources and then muck with compiling stuff 
that way (how many sys-admins wanna do this?).

Perl was removed from the base system for similiar reasons.  Keeping the 
base version up-to-date was too hard -- and installing a more up-to-date 
version from ports created a number of inconsistencies/problems for perl 
developers. (from what I remember)

It's not really that these things are hard to figure out, they just pose 
an additional nuisance.  Portage's improvements on the *BSD port system 
are debateable.

This is how I see it anyway.


--James