packaging system

[Eric]

On Thu, 2003-10-30 at 10:00, Emiel Kollof wrote:
<snip>
> Portage can be quirky. And the package-support in portage leaves
> something to be desired. When I was using gentoo for a while, the thing
> I missed the most was BSD's tarball packages. Compiling glibc, moz, X or
> even KDE is NO FUN on a measly PII 400.

I've been using Gentoo (against my will) for over a year now and I've
seen a number of problems with portage.  Most of them have to do with
who is running things than how portage works so I don't see them being a
problem here -- just want to make sure.
The first is that the base system is tied to portage.  I really prefer
*BSD's way of keeping system builds separate from ports.  I've got a
couple of foot holes from working with Gentoo in this regard.  We've
started a policy of not upgrading portage for at least 3 days after a
new revision and many revisions have been downgraded within a day or so.
My next beef is downgrading ports.  I've upgraded many ports only to
have them knocked back down in less than a week.  This is a problem with
how it's run, not portage itself.
Upgrading dependencies is a problem.  If I emerge something gnome-like
and it pulls in 50 dependencies, an 'emerge -up world' won't list the
dependencies that need upgrading.  This has serious security
implications too.  One of my co-workers has stated that he'd like to see
a "security upgrade" option where anything that has security fixes can
be upgraded at once w/out touching other things unless necessary.

Just my $.02

e

-- 
Eric <echriste at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>