Carsten Lohrke wrote: > Stop making such odd and wrong comparisons. The package manager is part of > what defines a distribution, choosing a shell is the users choice. If you > want to make the package manager matter of choice, start your own > distribution.
Just because it has historically been the case that a package manager often defines a distribution, that hardly means that it must do so. (Incidentally, I think that apt-with-rpm probably broke that perception long ago.) In any event, the ultimate issue, as far as I can tell, is whether or not it makes sense to have a package manager that would need to be chosen at the point of installation, but that would use the existing tree of ebuilds just as portage does. Would that be a Gentoo system? Personally, I don't see why it wouldn't, as it doesn't seem that different from deciding at install time to choose a BSD kernel and userland. Some modifications are required to use the system successfully compared to a default Gentoo Linux installation, but the overall philosophy remains the same. Now, would it be vastly more convenient if one could switch between portage and a portage alternative with no more hassle than running some sort of "conversion" scripts? Of course, and I suspect that somebody would write such scripts even if the lead devs didn't do it themselves, but I'm not sure that the bar for acceptance needs to be that high. -g2boojum- -- [email protected] mailing list
