The ports-system and userland in general.

Weapon of Mass Deduction blacklist at internl.net
Tue Dec 14 13:40:28 PST 2004


As far as I know, the Gentoo portage system is only for source-building 
(thus, it facilitates no binary packaging). If this is true, it is
not very suitable for enabling users to quickly access software like 
OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc. These take extremely long to build from source...

I never used the Gentoo portage system, but of course I know it and have
seen it work. I can't, however, think of anything about it that would be 
superior to the FreeBSD ports system, and certainly not to the 
(original) NetBSD pkgsrc system. In fact, it seems the BSD systems
allow for more and better configuration (via the commandline).
In addition, Gentoo portage uses 'rsync' for synchronising with the
CVS-tree of the ports/packages/you name it. That tool is said to be
much slower than 'cvsup', which is used by FreeBSD and I think NetBSD.

I found only one useful webpage about this topic: 
http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4linux1.php

I think it would be wise to evaluate 'rants' like these, to assure
we will have a flawless 'software management system', to give it a name.
To answer you question, the Gentoo portage system mimics the FreeBSD 
ports system in many ways, so I do not think it would be impossible to 
adopt it. But as I wrote, I don't think it should be taken into further 
consideration...

giupil wrote:
Hi,
I'm a newbie for the BSD system, I've always used Linux. Actually I'm
using Gentoo and I think that the Gentoo portage
system is better that the ports system. I can draw attention to this:
http://gentoo-bsd.grantgoodyear.org/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/InstallingGentooFbsd

Is the portage system possible to DragonFly?

Bye Giuseppe.



--
Greetings,
WMD (tfa . x @ inter . nl . net)




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