Michael Halcrow wrote:
On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 10:49:43PM -0600, Shane Hathaway wrote:
Gentoo is also for people like me who want all the latest stuff to
work well together. In my experience, most of the problems with
binary packages are due to subtle library incompatibilities. Gentoo
seems to eliminate that whole class of bugs. Thus Gentoo actually
saves me the time I used to spend chasing down library mismatches.
I've been running Debian for years (including testing branches), and I
don't recall the last time I had a library mismatch. If you want a
good mix of binary packages that are fairly well tested together, that
are fairly recent, and that get fairly up-to-date security fixes, give
Ubuntu a whirl.
That's just what I did. In fact, I just bought a computer for my
brother and installed Ubuntu on it. He has been quite happy with it.
However, I had trouble using Ubuntu for my own work because many of the
packages I use often are community-provided packages in various states
of maintenance. I longed for Gentoo, where even ebuilds that haven't
been updated in a long time still work well.
And don't get stupid with your package management. Do esoteric hacks
only if you know how to use the package manager right, and you won't
ever see a mismatched shared library.
This applies as long as you only use core packages. Even Ubuntu warns
users when they venture out of the collection of core packages.
Actually, I might be a misfit in the Gentoo community. I have an AMD 64
box, but I compile for x86 rather than amd64, so I give up a little
speed for stability.
Shane
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