Compatability with FreeBSD Ports [debian package tools]

[Michel Talon]

Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
 Debian has
literally thousands of contributors, partly because the system is a
maintainance hell. I completely agree with Andreas on that.
I don't agree. Debian has > 1000 contributors because Linux is 
infinitely more popular than *BSD, in particular for "political" 
reasons. Also they need a lot of contributors because they have
high criteria for inclusion in the stable distribution. But if
you look at the number of really active contributors, there is not
such a big difference with FreeBSD.

If you want to invest time, think about how apt-get can either be ported
Apt-get has no extraordinary magic that portupgrade misses. The 
difference between the two is mainly on the quality of the pool of
packages, and principally the fact one works with binary packages.
Source packages like in FreeBSD are only virtually working. You
can expect breakage at any moment. On the other hand, binary packages
as in Debian, with an extraordinary complex quality insurance procedure
(slow migration unstable -> testing -> stable), while insuring that
apt-get works, also insure that "stable" is always equivalent to
antiquated.


Portage looks nice for the first time you use, until you hit a major
problem with it. 
I have never used portage, but a lot of people are very happy with it.
But for sure i have encountered severe breakage in FreeBSD ports, so
i don't see any reason to despise the Gentoo work.