[Sussex] Gentoo moves to RPM

Thu Apr 3 13:34:01 UTC 2003

Fair enough, horses for courses. I've got enough spare boxes to give
Debian a go, but Gentoo is going to have to wait. Besides, apt seems a
very convenient way to manage one's distro, and I've not heard anything
bad about it.

Thank you for the extended explanation on the delights of installing
Gentoo by the way; got it running on your new workstation yet? I guess
it wouldn't take long to compile on such a beast.

Steve Williams,
sdp.williams at btinternet.com

"Once more unto the breach dear friends, once more, or close up the wall
with our English dead. In peace nothing so becomes a man as a modest
stillness and humility. But when the blast of war sounds in our ears
imitate the action of the Tiger; stiffen the sinews, conjure up the
blood, disguise fair nature with hard favoured rage. Then lend the eye a
terrible aspect, let it pry through the portage of the head, like the
brass cannon, let the brow overwhelm it as fearfully as doth a galled
rock o'erhang and jutty his confounded base, swilled with the wild and
wasteful ocean. Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide, hold
hard the breath, and bend up every spirit to his full height. On, on,
you noblest English, whose blood is fet from fathers war-proof, fathers
that like so many Alexanders have in these parts from morn till even
fought, and sheathed their swords from lack of argument. Dishonour not
your mothers; now attest that those whom you call fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood, and teach them how to war. And you,
good yeomen, whose limbs are made in England, show us here the mettle of
your pasture; let us swear that you are worth your breeding - which I
doubt not. For there is none of you so mean and base that hath not noble
lustre in your eyes. I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
straining upon the start. The game's afoot! Follow your spirit, and upon
this charge cry "God for King Harry, England and Saint George!"

William Shakespeare,
Henry V - A Warrior King

;-)

On Wed, 2003-04-02 at 07:33, Geoff Teale wrote:
> Steve W. Wrote:
> ---------------
> > Why, would this be a bad thing?
> > 
> > Or am I revealing my complete ignorance of all things Gentoo?
> 
> Simply put, yes :)
> 
> The reason it would be a bad thing is the fundemental reason why anyone uses
> Gentoo at all - it's mechanism for "package" management.  Gentoo uses a
> system that sits somewhere between the FreeBSD Ports system and Debian's
> apt-get mechanism.
> 
> The Portage tree in Gentoo is a directory of scripts which is synced with
> one (or many) of the Gentoo mirrors.  Each script (a .ebuild file) contains
> instructions on how to install an application.  An .ebuild file is much like
> a shell script (infact the majority of it is exactly what you'd type into
> bash to do the same job), with some additional headers to determin
> dependancies, etc..  What really distinguishes Gentoo from other such
> systems (i.e. Debian based distros) is that it installs from Source code.  
> 
> When I issue the instruction:
> 
> emerge /usr/portage/x11-wm/fluxbox
> 
> ... the following happens:
> 
> 1\ The Python program "emerge" opens up the most recent unmasked .ebuild
> file in the directory /usr/portage/x11-wm/fluxbox/
> 
> 2\ Emerge reads the dependencies from the header of the emerge file, if they
> are already installed then the program will continue, any missing packages
> will be "emerged" from the portage tree before this emerge will continue.
> Note - this means that, if it's not already installed, this emerge could
> result in XFree86 4.3 being pulled, compiled and installed - this takes time
> (about 25 minutes on my new machine, over an hour on my old one) - so it is
> useful to use emerge's -p (pretend) option to see what it's going to do up
> front.
> 
> 3\ Once all dependencies are satisfied, emerge will then pull the
> appropriate source for the package - how this is pulled depends on the
> script, it could be ftp, http or CVS.  In this case a tar.bz2 file will be
> pulled from fluxbox.sourceforge.net via ftp.
> 
> 4\ The .ebuild file will now step through the stages required to build and
> install fluxbox.  A key feature here is that the compiler options are set
> (where possible) by your /etc/make.conf file.  This file contains your own
> options, principally indicating CPU type and GCC optimisation flags and
> means that everything get compiled in a manner optiomised to your hardware.
> This is a good thing (TM) if your are looking to get the most out of your
> machine - it is equally a bad thing if you don't have time to wait for
> compiles.
> 
> So what does this give us that RPM doesn't?  RPM does not resolve
> dependancies, only notes them.  RPM, does not build from source (although
> you can use SRPMS to install it).  You have to go and find an RPM, an ebuild
> file is available from a directory structure on your own machine and can be
> searched for trivially.  Gentoo allows much more control over packages, up
> to and including "sandbox" installations, "injection" of packages installed
> outside the portage tree and the ability to upgrade between versions (i.e
> 1.2 -> 1.4) with a simple - `emerge rsync && emerge -u world`.
> 
> Ultimately Gentoo allows you the freedom to build your machine they way you
> want it (there is no default build), to be at the cutting edge (or for those
> with ~x86, ~PPC or ~SPARC defined, the bleeding edge) of LINUX technology
> and to get the most out of your machine.  It probably isn't something you
> want to run on your production server - Debian would be a better bet there -
> but for the Linux geek there are few better options if you have a home
> machine on which you like to fiddle around, it is also the choice of many
> developers working on major projects such as KDE, Gnome, Mozilla and
> OpenOffice.org because it allows them to keep their whole development
> environment upto date with the minimum of effort whilst seemlessly
> integrating with their CVS repositories.
> 
> The biggest hurdle to Gentoo use is the amount of time it takes to get it up
> and running.  There are three solutions to this: 
> 
> 1. Buy a very fast machine.
> 
> 2. Wait until the 1.4 release proper and use the GNU Reference Platform
> builds to build a machine in 20 minutes or so (far less optimal, but good
> none the less).
> 
> 3. Install the portage tree on your current ditribution and this gain a lot
> of the benefits of Gentoo without having to build a Gentoo machine -
> instructions for doing this can be found here:
> 
> http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=28559
> 
> IF you want more information I suggest you head over to
> http://www.gentoo.org 
> 
> -- 
> geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk
> tealeg at member.fsf.org
> 
> "And I hope that you die and your death'll come soon
> I will follow your casket in the pale afternoon
> And I'll watch while you're lowered down to your deathbed
> And I'll stand o'er your grave 'til I'm sure that you're dead"
>  - Bob Dylan, a pacifist :-)
> 
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