Re: [gentoo-user] EAPI packages

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 8:13 AM, hw <hw@×××××.de> wrote:
>
> Every three months is not infrequently.
>
>...
>
> Seriously, update every day?
>

As Neil has mentioned, there seems to be a mismatch in expectations.
Every day updates are probably fairly typical for Gentoo users.  I
don't update all my containers every day, but a typical container is
@system, a few convenience applications (screen, vim, atop, etckeeper,
cfg-update, nullmailer), and a single real application.  And those get
updated monthly (and from having updated my host daily issues that
come up tend to be repeats).

By Gentoo standards updates every three months is fairly infrequently.
And the system you're having issues with at the moment is a few times
older than that.

Remember, this isn't a binary distro where the only thing you need
working to do an upgrade is tar, gzip, and stuff like glibc.  Gentoo
updates require working build systems and those tend to be fussy.  The
list of dependencies is MUCH larger, and when you factor in USE flags
the configuration space is huge.  This makes portage slower than a
typical binary package manager, and updates are more failure-prone.

If you want something that "just works" I fully get that, but it just
isn't Gentoo.  Our developers and most of our users would not want to
sacrifice some tweakability just to make emerge die less often.

I do sympathize that the other distros aren't quite meeting your
needs.  Gentoo can do just about anything, but it comes at the cost of
tinkering.  It sounds like you want Arch minus systemd, but you'll
probably need to start your own distro for that.  Unfortunately
distros require a certain critical mass and there are only so many
permutations of the binary distros out there.

-- 
Rich