Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo Healthy? (The Return)

[Mark Knecht]

On 7/5/07, Paul Waring <paul@×××.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 04, 2007 at 09:40:10PM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
> >   emerge is along the same lines.  "make menuconfig" is the limits of my
> > expertise.  I remember "RPM hell" with Redhat linux, trying to find an
> > RPM package for a program I wanted, where the developer hadn't linked it
> > against a bunch of stuff I didn't have.  I can take a text-only basic
> > system, "emerge gimp", and emerge will pull in and build, in the right
> > order, all the necessary X libraries, GTK, etc, etc.  I end up with a
> > functional TWM "desktop".  "emerge bbkeys" emerges blackbox
> > key-controls... after first emerging blackbox.  Try doing that with
> > RPMs.
>
> What makes you think that you can't do that with RPMs now? Seven years
> ago they were a nightmare but things have moved on since then. The same
> goes for deb files (can't think of any other major ones off the top of
> my head).
>
> Paul

Well, in the world of audio RPMs anyway the problem always was that
different audio apps used different versions of libraries. Last time I
used Fedora (maybe 3-4 years ago now) none of the RPM managers would
automatically go find all the right libraries for some odd audio app I
wanted to try out, and then even if they did if I decided to take the
app off my system there wasn't a good way to clean up after the fact.

Beyond that I never had a major Fedora upgrade go cleanly. My Gentoo
machines are now multi-years old and they just update each week or two
as new revisions come out.

I'm sure things are much better today but I still hear folks complain
about this sort of this on the pro-audio lists once in awhile. I
couldn't have written a better description of my use of Gentoo than
Walter did. I'm pretty much exactly the same sort of user. Gentoo
works great for me.

Cheers,
Mark
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