Matthew Ross Walker wrote:
Just to chime in late, I used to be a SUSE fan, but I left it behind years ago. Maybe it's improved some of it's flaws since then, but the problems with managing config files and RPM hell were my main to reasons for leaving. I love my Gentoo boxen, and as long as I don't do anything stupid, they love me back.
I agree, yet I can't pin down exactly why Gentoo turns out to be friendlier than RPM-based distros. Intuitively, prebuilt packages *should* be easier, but the packaging system always seems to unravel and devolve into a complicated mess.
Perhaps it's because my definition of stable vs. unstable software never matches any distributors' definition. I like the latest kernel, KDE, GIMP, Python, and games, but I prefer a more time-tested version of GTK, Qt, Perl, Apache, emacs, vim, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. In fact, my definition of stability changes often, since when I begin a project, I want to depend on the software that will be stable by the end of the project.
Gentoo lets me make fine-grained choices about the stability of each package, then churns away in the background to make those choices a reality. I once tried to achieve similar freedom using SRPMs and rpmbuild, but rpmbuild is far less automated than Portage, so SRPMs turned out to require a horrible amount of work. (A full-time job, no doubt.)
I wonder how well Debian automates building from sources. Shane /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
