[NTLUG:Discuss] Debian

[Spicerun]

Tom wrote:

> I settled on Gentoo and it has pretty much solved the library issues, 
> but does require considerable maintenance because of the bleeding edge 
> nature of the distro, and has a fairly steep learning curve to install 
> and administer the system.
> I've only run into a couple of things that weren't available 
> pre-packaged but since it uses tarballs it's very easy to install 
> things even though it's not pre-packaged and the system will recognize 
> the software is installed so dependency issues have never been a 
> problem.  It's source code based, so you compile everything on the 
> system for your particular hardware (which can require a considerable 
> amount of time.) and it uses a unique scheme for the runlevel startup 
> scripts.
>
> A nice thing about the distro is that the repository information is 
> dynamic so if a site quits hosting a repository, or goes off line, 
> looses network, etc, the system can locate alternatives.

Tom,

I agree with you.  I've been running Gentoo for over 1 and a half years, 
and I've been very happy with their portage packaging system.  I used to 
get very exasperated with rpms because it was always needing some 
dependency I would have to search for (the RPM packager wasn't even 
smart enough to tell me exactly what package I needed (missing libfoo 
was not enough information to tell me what package foobar.rpm I 
needed).  I tried debian and apt-get, but I got very unhappy when my 
system broke after I pulled a package.  I may not have had dependency 
problems under apt-get, but it was frustrating with that binary that 
just got installed didn't work, and broke several more things ... and, 
naturally, apt-get never could tell me exactly what I had to remove to 
revert the system back.

The worst problem I have with Gentoo is that sometimes the packages 
would not compile, but at least when there is an error like that, 
portage does not install the broken package into your system.  And most 
errors in compiling so far that I've found are errors that are actually 
in the source tarballs themselves straight from the author, or simply 
some goof in the Gentoo's instruction file (.ebuild) that tell Gentoo 
how to compile the file.

BTW, While I agree that Gentoo is a fairly steep learning curve to 
install and configure, I've found the maintainance to be easy, just 
running emerge sync every night or so, then check the list as to what 
new package there is, which does not mean I have to install the package 
if I don't want.  And, I'll throw in one more item I appreciate about 
Gentoo, and that is it is versionless....I can start installation with 
last year's Live CD or this year's Live CD, and by the time I'm 
finished, I have the most current version of Gentoo available.  And it 
isn't necessary for me beyond that point to have to keep downloading the 
next released version on CD just to keep upgraded to the most current.  
I can't say that about Red Hat or Debian where, sooner or later, there 
were so many upgrades, I had no choice to get the next released CD 
version to do the 'big' upgrade to the next version.