Quoting David Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Gentoo does tend to be a bit slower about stabilzing packages. This is probably because it is so easy to add keywords for specific packages.
Yeah, I think while the keywords stuff is a good idea on the one hand, and gives flexibility and such.. it's also a bad idea in that it seems to make people a little lazy. They either forget to work on testing or officially releasing versions on keywords, or just don't bother figuring so many use added keywords (and have been for ages) anyway.
It's become way less of an issue as amd64 has become more standard over the last couple years too. Less of an "also ran" arch vs the dominant one, I think.
The one thing in gentoo that I like but has also been a tad of a pain from time to time is the whole USE flag system. I like the flexibility, but have had a couple cases where I realized after a whole batch of emerge builds ran, that I needed to add a flag that now makes most of them have to rebuild again. Sure it works and is automated, but I have to wait again. That's the one negative to the source based setup, and I've been willing to accept that for the flexibility and ease of use portage has given me; especially compared to how much of a pain the rpm based systems can be when you want to tack on something more bleeding edge.
Example: right now I can't run the latest FF betas on my desktop at work because they need a version of pango that's newer then even my SLED10-SP1 install at work, and I didn't have the time to build the 4 or 5 levels of dependencies for that. I did give it a shot a week or two ago in a few short spurts of time I had to play with it.. but failed. Mostly because I wanted to keep a seperate install of just the needed updated bits so that I could drop it into our shared AFS disk space for use by anyone that wanted to if possible.. vs creating updated rpms on top of our tested image.
-- Mike Marion-Unix/Linux Admin-http://www.miguelito.org "AOL: we make your life simpler provided you don't know what you're doing... and we intend to keep it that way!" - Another sig from /. -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
