On Thu, Oct 21, 2004 at 10:30:21AM +0200, Paul de Vrieze wrote:
> You might want to try dispatch-conf. It is superior to etc-update in many 
> aspects, and it comes with gentoolkit. Further there is normally no need 
> to update every night. While there is no problem with it, it will 
> increase the maintenance load unnecessarilly.

Actually it's part of Portage (at least until .51_rc9), but that's
nitpicking :)

> The thing is that portage's binary packages are far from perfect when 
> compared for example with rpm's. The problem is caused by the fact that 
> two seemingly similar binary packages can be different to the extend that 
> one will work on your system and the other not. As gentoo is mainly a 
> source distribution the effort required to make binaries "better" is 
> probably too big. Even then all kinds of binary problems are unavoidable 
> and the main cause of releases in all binary distributions, even debian. 
> With source one can mix and match, with binary releases one must ensure 
> that all dependencies are completely compatible with the versions that 
> existed when the package was built.

Some issues with binary releases are covered by a document that rac has on
his dev page. It's not the official Gentoo policy, but it does make you
think about it :)

http://dev.gentoo.org/~rac/binaries.html

Just a complementary note.

Wkr,
      Sven Vermeulen

-- 
  Documentation & PR project leader

  The Gentoo Project   <<< http://www.gentoo.org >>>