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  • From: Kevin Monceaux <Kevin AT RawFedDogs.net>
  • To: Source Mage Discuss Mailing List <SM-Discuss AT Lists.IBiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] Going back to Gentoo
  • Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:14:14 -0500 (CDT)

On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, flux wrote:

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. :)

I was little shocked myself at some of the improvements. After the first time around with Gentoo I swore I'd never install Gentoo again. But for some reason I can't quite figure out I got the feeling recently that I should give Gentoo another chance. Of course, things are working well right now and that may be partially due to this being a fresh install. Down the road I might very well start encountering some of the same problems I ran into the first time around with Gentoo.

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.

This functionality might not have existed back then, but now there are portage overlays which makes tweaking an ebuild relatively easy. In my make.conf file I have:

PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/home/dokpm0/Portage"

On my previous install of Gentoo I used a portage overlay to apply a small patch to ffmpeg. Under the above directory I:

# mkdir -p media-video/ffmpeg
# cd media-video/ffmpeg
# cp /usr/portage/media-video/ffmpeg/ffmpeg-0.4.9_p20080326.ebuild .
# mkdir files

Copy any patches the above ebuild applies to the files directory along with the patch I wanted to apply. Change the revision number so portage realizes this is an updated version:

# mv ffmpeg-0.4.9_p20080326.ebuild ffmpeg-0.4.9_p20080326-r1.ebuild

Edit the ebuild to add the patch I want to apply, then:

# ebuild ffmpeg-0.4.9_p20080326-r1.ebuild digest

which creates the Manifest file to make portage happy with the above ebuild, then:

# emerge -u ffmpeg

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.

Ease of adding custom configure options is definitely a nice feature of SMGL.

About this revdep-rebuild: did it actually have anything to fix?

No, but I was comparing it to a cleanse run that also had nothing 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.

It does sound like cleanse does a more thorough job. Now if it would just stop trying to fix the openoffice-bin package I installed that's wasn't
broken or trying to fix tetex because I updated a map file to add some fonts I installed ...

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.

I had a similar problem with cleanse. I followed the suggestions someone mentioned on IRC to get firefox, xulrunner, and flash cooperating with each other. Cleanse came behind me and tried to fix firefox, which broke xulrunner. It then tried to fix xulrunner and gave up saying it couldn't be fixed.

Granted with all of the above problems cleanse had good reason to think things were broken. After editing a few install and md5 logs I got cleanse working nicely with all of the above. But it was fighting with cleanse that inspired me to give Gentoo yet one more try.

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!

One thing I meant to mention in my previous e-mail but forgot is that one of the things I really like about SMGL is the community. And, the community might just sway me back to the SMGL side of the fence.

With Gentoo I usually just skim the messages on the users mailing list and have never cared to check out their IRC channel.

With SMGL the mailing list and IRC are fun places to be. And I do like the idea of actually being able to contribute by creating/updating spells, etc. The Gentoo community is so large that usually by the time I come across a problem there's already a bug report and suggested fix in Gentoo's bugzilla.

Smeg, I'm more torn than I was before. :-)



Kevin
http://www.RawFedDogs.net
http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org
Bruceville, TX

Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla!!!





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