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On Wed, 2003-06-04 at 20:52, Joseph Carter wrote: |
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> Any plans to cooperate with the fink people on this? That might be |
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> getting a bit out of the realm of what's normal and expected for Gentoo, |
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> but I happen to think that portage is a lot better suited to building fink |
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> packages than anything Debian's got these days. |
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ah, i cannot resist responding to that jab from a developer's |
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perspective: |
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advantages of DebianStyle(R)(TM)(C): |
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- extensive set of tools to validate and QA packages (lintian is really |
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full-featured) |
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- picky policy on where things should go, what should always be in a |
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package, etc. and its documented, whereas some things are still kind of |
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up in the air for Gentoo, or more just guidelines...gives a consistent |
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feel to Debian. |
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disadvantages of DebianStyle(R)(TM)(C): |
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- takes too long to get your head around the complete building process, |
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there are lots of docs and policy to take in, in more than one set of |
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documentation |
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- too many ways to set up the build process...the policy just dictates |
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some expected files and expected debian/rules targets, so you're free to |
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do it in your own way, which leads to wheel reinvention. |
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- ad-hoc external patch (changes outside of Debian-specific diffs) |
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mechanisms (dpatch, dbs, hand-rolled). dpatch requires you to create a |
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damn script for each external patch you want to apply (argh!!). there is |
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a tool to help with this, but still... |
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- too much legacy stuff hanging around (probably understandable, given |
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~8000 packages), so improvements to the package build system as a whole |
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are in tiny tiny increments: they're too scared of breaking backwards |
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compatibility for new features. NB: how is Gentoo going to handle |
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scaling while maintaining Portage feature increase? |
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- sucky kernel module building system (tried building nvidia-kernel on |
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Debian? heh...due to it using make-kpkg, less than intuitive compared to |
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'emerge nvidia-kernel') |
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disadvantages of ebuilds i've noticed: |
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- one ebuild can't generate multiple installed packages. this is why i |
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suppose eclasses were invented. |
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by no means a definitive list, but for those of you that aren't from a |
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Debian maintainer background, some things i ran into during my tenure. |
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Gentoo isn't doing all that badly, though. Debian was pretty ad-hoc in |
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the early days, so i'm positive for Gentoo's future. |
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i still use both Debian and Gentoo :) |
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leon |
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-- |
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gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list |
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