OK you are probably correct but the point I was trying to make was that with
a couple of commands...

emerge rsync && emerge -up world
then
emerge -uU world

 .....I have...
KDE 3.3
Gimp 2.0.4
K3b 0.11.12-r1
Mozilla 1.7.2-r1
Gift 0.11.6-r1
Apollon 0.9.3
Samba 3.0.7
Apache 2.0.50-r1
Cups 1.1.20
Gnucash 1.8.9
Etc. etc.

It is very simple for a user (not a geek or an expert) to have very up to
date packages.
I will stop now because I do not want to run down other distros - I just
like the ease of use with Gentoo - for me.

Regards, Robert

 -----Original Message-----
From:   Matthew Gregan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent:   Tuesday, 14 September 2004 10:42 a.m.
To:     '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
Subject:        Re: Right way to compile Debian packages?

At 2004-09-14T10:28:48+1200, Fisher, Robert (FXNZ CHC) wrote:
> I challenge any non Gentoo user to match the stable versions of
> packages we Gentoo users have.

It's a pointless challenge.  The version numbers of a package are fairly
meaningless when comparing across distributions.  Why?  Because some
distributions backport large amounts of functionality from the latest
version of a package to make the features available in what would
otherwise appears to be an older version of the package.

For example, and just looking at kernel features:
- SuSE has had I/O write barriers in their kernel since 2.4.x, but this
  feature has only become available in the kernel.org kernel since
  2.6.9-rc1.
- Red Hat had NPTL and KAIO before any other distribution, and often has
  fixes in their glibc that aren't even available in glibc CVS yet.

I could list examples like this ad infinitum.

Cheers,
-mjg
-- 
Matthew Gregan                     |/
                                  /|                [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Reply via email to