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  • From: flux <flux AT sourcemage.org>
  • To: SourceMage Discuss Mailing List <SM-Discuss AT Lists.IBiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] Going back to Gentoo
  • Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:18:15 -0400

First, as a former Gentoo user myself, I would like to see Gentoo
improve and I'd be happy to commend them on a vast improvement if things
have gotten as good as you say. I'm a little bit skeptical, but it's
definitely possible they have come that far. :)

Since ruskie already gaze a good reply pointing out how else you can
leverage SMGL tools when you know how (yes, knowing how is part of the
issue, a lot of these things are documented, but for example sorcery
file locations are not so well documented), I'm only going to reply on a
point that ruskie didn't (I assume he doesn't have experience with
Gentoo).

I myself used Gentoo for many years before switching to SMGL. The
lengthy sync times were annoying to me as well, but those were not the
real reasons I switched. I could tolerate those. However, emerging
packages and having broken dependencies which revdep-rebuild absolutely
failed to fix were not tolerable. Nor was the fact that I couldn't
actually configure vim to support XIM and multibyte support via the
ebuild, because 1) there were no use flags for those options and 2) the
ebuild was being checked against a stored hash for it to prevent
corruption/hacking, so I couldn't validly modify the ebuild to suit my
needs. I'll address the revdep issue in a moment. The issue with vim was
easily solved on SMGL for me, since not only did they already have the
options supported, but even if they didn't sorcery allowed me to
manually set configure options DURING THE BUILD! I had never heard of
any other package manager coming even remotely close to that level of
configurability before, and that's where I instantly fell in love with
SMGL.

> Another area where speed is concerned - revdep-rebuild versus cleanse:
> With a little over 300 packages on my SMGL box a cleanse run took well
> over an hour. I just ran a revdep-rebuild on my Gentoo box with 494
> installed packages. Total time was 2:06.17. That's two minutes, not
> hours. Now that might not be a fair comparison. I'm not sure exactly
> what's going on under the hood but I suspect cleanse is performing a much
> more thorough check, sometimes too thorough. Did I mention my recent
> battles with cleanse above?

About this revdep-rebuild: did it actually have anything to fix? I'm
betting that you were running this on a "clean" system where there were
no broken dependencies to recover from. Also, unless the functionality
of revdep-rebuild has changed since I used it (quite possible, as I
switched to SMGL in early 2006), it only handles dependency resolution,
and not things like broken symlinks or incorrect file permissions, etc.
Also, from my memories (nightmares) with revdep-rebuild, it ran quite
fast all the time, but only because it would horribly fail when there
was actual work to do. It would state that something needed to be fixed
and that it was going to fix it, run for a while, and then crash without
even giving an indication as to how to fix things manually. It was quite
useless to me on my system. Maybe because I didn't update my system
often enough (partly due to the exceptionally long sync times)? I don't
know. If revdep-rebuild actually works now at fixing broken
dependencies, then that's really great. It's also quite good if it can
still manage to do that in 4 minutes or so. I doubt that it does all the
additional checking that cleanse does though (when cleanse is configured
to do so) ;-).

One final note about the differences you mentioned: Gentoo has a crapton
of packages, but they also have a crapton of developers (relative to
SMGL). I remember one of our developers chatted with a Gentoo developer
in the past, and the ratio of packages to the number of developers was
actually about the same for the two distributions. Which just means that
(package-wise) we are all working about equally as hard :-D. Go linux!

--
Justin "flux_control" Boffemmyer
Cauldron wizard and general mage
Source Mage GNU/Linux
http://www.sourcemage.org

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