Re: [gentoo-dev] "Distro Day (Measuring the benefits of the Gentoo approach)"

[Alan]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2003 at 05:03:19PM +0200, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 13, 2003 at 10:07:54AM -0400, brett holcomb wrote:
> > Well, if speed is all they want to worry about <G>.
> > However, I find that one of the biggest advantages of
> > Gentoo is no more RPMs!!!!  Come to think of it - if I
> > factor in all the time it takes to get all the
> > dependencies and files to satisfy them on an RPM based
> > system then Gentoo is way faster - by days <G>.
>
> RPMs are no bad invention. The only problem is that the RPM-based
> distributions lacked a decent frontend for a long time. Most users where also
> informed that "rpm -i" was the preferred method to install software.
>
> Think of RPM vs Ebuild. How many times do you install an ebuild using "ebuild
> <ebuildfile> merge"?

True.  Mandrake's urpmi seems to work nicely though, once you get a good
mirror.  My thing for liking portage over others though is not getting
rid of rpms or extra speed but the transparancy of the system, the
protage SLOT system and good old USE flags.  If
mandrake/debian/redhat/etc provided distros that  had choices  gnome/kde,kde 
and no gnome, no kde and gnome, all graphics formats, no gif, all png, no
snmp, all snmp, etc, then they would get my attention.  Preaching to the
choir here I know but the flexability of USE flags and the ability to
not only compile what I want, but do it with the options I want, is
huge.  The slashdot doubters do have a point though, as the last time I
upgraded KDE in gentoo it was a day or more of compiling, opposed to an
hour or so (if that) of downloading debs/rpms and 5 minutes of
installing them :)  That's the compromise though I guess :)


-- 
Alan <alan@×××××.org> - http://arcterex.net
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