> portage is horrid. i hate it more every time i use it. > and it doesn't work. revdep rebuild is proof.
it is a lot more dependable than any other package maintenance system I've used on *NIX based systems. The fundamental problem requiring revdep is > it's not clear to me that this is gentoo's fault. linux and > gnu together are one heck of a difficult place for > a distribution to live. but replicating portage would seem > to me to be a big mistake. I see that I was not clear. I have no intention of replicating portage, but I DO intend to replicate some of the fundamental functionality. I do not see this as much more than an extension of fgb's contrib or ron's new package installer. If you see otherwise I would love to hear why. > not only does the plan 9 > community lack the resources to maintain 30 different > versions of /bin/cp (or whatever), much less portage redux, > it will encourage gnu/linux habits, because that's what it's > built for. in practice, there are only two versions which are actively maintained -- the canonical stable version, and the latest experimental. Assuming that the stable version is in fact actually stable, then there is little need to actually maintain older versions, but sometimes it is useful to go back and reconfigure them. Particularly when you have scripts and things which depend on some oddities command line arguments (I'm referring here to the thread regarding standard arguments). Lacking some mechanism to deal with specific versions, just to name one issue, is that you have no easy way to get go back to a known working version when an update breaks something. The situation which prompted this very thread is a case in point. My motivation for wanting, and probably implementing, version controlled builds/runs is to dependently replicating complicated modeling scenarios. > we should build something that encourages a simplier > system, a system plan 9 people would really want. As I said I was motivated by my portage experience not that I intend to reimplement portage, but even if I did attempt a reimplementation the fact that plan 9 is a much cleaner design, probably 3/4 of the junk is simply not needed. The question is how much of the basic functionality is useful, and what is the most appropriate way to go about implementing it. EBo --
