Quoting Al Tobey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
What I'm disappointed about is that I install Gentoo about once a year
because I want to try some new thing out. The last couple times,
Gentoo has actually been behind Fedora and Ubuntu in getting whatever
I'm looking for into portage (kvm, perl, KDE4, PulseAudio, xorg
infrastructure stuff to name a few). The default keyword settings
these days seem to be well behind Ubuntu and/or Fedora. Globally
setting ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~* (or x86/amd64) is a disaster worse than
running rawhide or debian experimental, so I have to slog through
entries in /etc/portage to get various components upgraded. It
works, though. I know the distribution is really about tuning your
distro to taste, and I like that about it. I just think it's
evolving away from one of its primary audiences.
Interesting.. obviously YMHV ("H"as varied... :P) but my experience
has been that gentoo is usually pretty bleeding edge. Yes, you tend
to have to add the ~amd64 keyword (I haven't bought a 32bit chip in
years.. last was my macbook pro, only because the C2D based ones
weren't out yet) but again, my experience has been that I rarely run
into compile/build/dependency issues. In fact, about the only ones I
ever run into are due to going several months without doing any
updates, then trying to do an update that wants to do a huge list of
sw.. and something was dropped. Usually I just have to unmerge 1 or 2
packages and then the update cruises along.
I have run into a couple rare instances were something didn't want to
build OOTB on amd64, but found answers via google within a few minutes
each time.
Often again, it was a lack of regular updates and I needed to force
something like a revdep-rebuild or update a package that it didn't
have in it's dependency list for some reason.
For REALLY bleeding edge, there are now layman overlays. I used that
to install kde4 a month or two ago to try it out. Worked really well.
Only issue I ran into was from having some pre-release (kde4
pre-release) packages from an early alpha layman on there.. I removed
those and fired off the kde4 build and it ran though fine.
I haven't pushed things at all with perl or python so no comments there.
I can't really compare to fedora because I mostly gave up on RH ages
ago.. they just pissed me off too many times via encounters at work,
coupled with rpm dependency hells I ran into far too often with them.
I've been loving how well gentoo's portage works, and similarly,
darwinports on OSX too.
--
Mike Marion-Unix/Linux Admin-http://www.miguelito.org
Apu: "Hey. Hey! Hey! I have asked you nicely not to mangle my merchandise.
You leave me no choice but to...ask you nicely again." ==> Simpsons
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