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On 29-Mar-07, at 11:20 PM, Ciaran McCreesh wrote: |
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> Have a look at [1] and all the open "Portage should..." bugs. Would |
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> any of those improve the user experience for you? Can you think of |
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> other features of a similar nature that would make your life easier? |
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> That Portage works does not mean that it is anywhere near ideal... |
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Sure it's not ideal and I acknowledge that. But portage is tied very |
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closely to Gentoo for historical reasons, and it is not reasonable to |
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expect an alternate package manager to replace it (not in the near |
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future atleast). How about implementing the features you mention in |
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portage? I know what your response would be though: portage is too |
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much "spaghetti" code to even think about it. But guess what, if you |
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do succeed in making a patch that adds a feature to portage, it'll be |
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accepted faster than you think. Maybe, given the current situation, |
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that is the best way to provide a "better experience" to the users |
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you are so worried about; atleast for those users who don't want to |
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try out package managers unsupported by Gentoo. |
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> A few years ago Gentoo had some serious advantages over the |
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> competition. These days, Gentoo is at serious risk of being Red |
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> Queened |
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> by Ubuntu and Fedora. Providing the same thing that was provided two |
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> years ago isn't enough. If Portage can't deliver functionality that |
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> makes Gentoo competitive with where Ubuntu will be a year from now, |
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> Portage has to be replaced. |
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You are comparing Gentoo with the wrong distributions. Both Ubuntu |
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and Fedora have people working on it 24x7, and they are being *paid* |
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to do so. Gentoo is a community distribution which is entirely |
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volunteer driven, and you can't expect it to match with the pace of |
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commercial distributions such as the ones you mention. Debian is a |
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distro you could compare with, and you'll have to accept the fact |
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that they develop *for* the developers, much like Gentoo. |
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So, really, I don't care if Ubuntu becomes more popular than Gentoo. |
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Isn't it already?! |
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Point is, the day when more than 50% of the devs feel we need a new |
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package manager, will be the day a replacement will be made. |
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Cheers, |
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-- |
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Anant |
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-- |
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