>My biggest problem with Gentoo was not so much the time needed to >compile huge ebuilds like Firefox, Thunderbird, or Chromium, but that >say if you neglected doing updates for a while and then decided to start >again, then you'd have serious problems. This is because, at least the >way I understood it, after some time old ebuilds would get deleted from >the Portage servers to conserve space there, but some of those now >deleted ebuilds would still be needed as dependencies to do iterative >updates. The sure-way to resolve this problem would be to re-emerge the >whole @world set, which of course would take way-longer than just >Firefox, and might work differently because the '/etc/' configuration >schema might have changed. > >In my case I had some weird problem either emerging some ebuild or >keeping an old version of an ebuild to keep the functionality or the >'/etc/' schema removed in the new versions. I just let things sit, and >moved on to other projects. But when later on I tried to go back to the >original issue, I had even more trouble because now I was even further >behind @world, and more ebuilds would not upgrade because of deleted >dependencies. > >So to sum it up, my problem with Gentoo was that you could not just do >iterative updates after long periods of inactivity. You pretty much had >to emerge daily and if you had some problem then drop everything and fix >it right away, or else you'll fall even further behind and eventually >might have to rebuild @world. And so because constant attention >intervention and trial and error was required you could not just compile >huge ebuilds overnight and go about your life during the day.
It's funny how different two people can perceive the same thing. One of the very reason I like Gentoo is the fact that I *don't* have to do daily, or even weekly updates. I'm rather busy with life right now and I just love how little love Gentoo requires to work, and how reliable it is. I have never had any issues with postponing updates for longer periods of time. -- Hund
