On Fri, 2007-03-30 at 03:07 +0530, Anant Narayanan wrote: > Sure it's not ideal and I acknowledge that. But portage is tied very > closely to Gentoo for historical reasons, and it is not reasonable to > expect an alternate package manager to replace it (not in the near > future atleast).
Historical reasons aren't necessarily the correct reasons. I'd almost say that your sentence has officially heralded the age of Debianisation. > How about implementing the features you mention in > portage? I know what your response would be though: portage is too > much "spaghetti" code to even think about it. Have you ever tried to add features to a frankenstein of a beast? What is the value to you in doing something like that? Isn't there more value in designing something based on what you've learned instead? We can all go all day about this and not convince each other, so please let's just drop this line of thinking. > But guess what, if you > do succeed in making a patch that adds a feature to portage, it'll be > accepted faster than you think. Maybe, given the current situation, > that is the best way to provide a "better experience" to the users > you are so worried about; atleast for those users who don't want to > try out package managers unsupported by Gentoo. What are you basing any of this on? Sounds like speculation that doesn't help anything. > You are comparing Gentoo with the wrong distributions. Both Ubuntu > and Fedora have people working on it 24x7, and they are being *paid* > to do so. Gentoo is a community distribution which is entirely > volunteer driven, and you can't expect it to match with the pace of > commercial distributions such as the ones you mention. Debian is a > distro you could compare with, and you'll have to accept the fact > that they develop *for* the developers, much like Gentoo. Debian was never a distro that I thought we'd emulate, or should emulate. Turns out I was wrong, I suppose. > So, really, I don't care if Ubuntu becomes more popular than Gentoo. > Isn't it already?! Here we agree. I don't think Ciaran is arguing popularity either. He's arguing that the compelling case for using Gentoo is what's fading. There's a difference. > Point is, the day when more than 50% of the devs feel we need a new > package manager, will be the day a replacement will be made. I'm not entirely sure on your reasons for this statement. If developers' don't face any API changes, why should we have to have a political vote on which package manager gets dubbed the one true official one? Why should it be a popularity contest? Why can it not be a technical superiority issue? If there is a compelling set of technical reasons to replace portage, why ignore that set? Portage is more than the package manager. Its life comes from the portage _tree_. Portage is just the tool that is used to use that tree. If that tool is outdated (and let's be honest, it kind of is), then switching it is not actually a bad thing. In sum, I'm not sure I like this direction of basing technical things on political decisions. Thanks, Seemant
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