> Portage problems: > 1. It's not easy to use an older version of software. We can't > upgrade to mysql 4.x for political reasons and have to run 3.x > Portage constantly wants to upgrade to 4. I pinned it to 3.x, but > that breaks builds of many packages that depend on mysql. Most of > them have an optional dependency, which I don't really use, but since > mysql was installed when these packages were first installed, they now > depend on it.There's no nice automatic way to find all of these and > make them not depend on mysql.
see what depends on mysql: equery h mysql then reemerge world with -mysql > > 2. There are at least 3 places where a package can be masked. > /etc/portage/packages.mask, USE flags, > /usr/portage/profiles/packages.mask and those are the ones I know > about. Some may have been deprecated, but they are still used. whats wrong with that > 3. Trying to build something that is masked is a nightmare. Why > would anyone want to do this? Sometimes it takes forever for a new > port to be unmasked. FreeBSD's gnome team is usually 2 months ahead > of Gentoo's for new releases. If the port or a next-level dependency > are masked, I believe it's easy to figure out what to unmask. If it's > a deeper dependency, you have to try the build, decipher the error, > unmask, rinse and repeat. Try that for something like gnome with a > few hundred dependencies -- all masked. emerge -Dtpv gnome > 4. Finding dependencies isn't easy -- see #3. The only way I found > was to keep trying and deal with them one at a time as emerge errored > out. equery or qpkg > 5. Inside joke, how do you emerge the rsync package -- emerge rsync > ?? This one isn't brokem anymore, but it used to cause me grief every > time. trivial to get around even if it's your first time to encounter it. > Organizational problems: > 1. It is common to wait a week or so after every portage update in > case something is broken. This may seem like common sense, but it > follows from being burned numerous times. There was a period where > portage was downgraded after almost every upgrade. its not perfect > 2. Things often sit in a masked state for a long time before being > unmasked. I understand this is a volunteer effort, but it's often not > clear from the ChangeLog why something is waiting. #3 above shows why > this is a problem. ask the maintainer > 3. Downgrading ports for no appearant reason. Once again, the > ChangeLog often doesn't say why it's downgraded -- it just is. read GLSA and gentoo-announce > I've only used FreeBSD ports and portage, and as bad as ports is > sometimes, it's much better than portage. People talking about using > portage has me looking for a clue-by-four :-) I have used deb/apt, ports, pkgsrc, rpm, sorcery/sourcemagelinux. sorcery and portage had less problems. Perhaps because ~90% of open source software is built assuming linux? --ed
