[Sussex] Debian news...

[Simon Huggins]

Salut LUG!

On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 09:16:37AM +0100, Geoffrey J. Teale wrote:
> Simon Huggins <huggie at earth.li> writes:
> > Presumably he just needs to fiddle the kernel for Ubuntu to recognise
> > his network card whereas with Gentoo you lose the lovely package
> > management and have to compile everything from source.
> Er.. no.. you have a different but equally lovely package management
> system - you do have to spend a lot of time compiling though :-) 

I didn't think gentoo had packages just files that told you how to build
things?

Do those files (are they the ebuild bits?) control the "requires version
blah to build" or does it rely just on the configure script?

Do they do virtual packages too?  How does one say "this ebuild depends
on a web server"?

The only bit of gentoo that seems vaguely tempting to me is the USE
flags bit.  But it seemed that if you changed the USE flags after you'd
built a pile of stuff you have to then manually go back and set the
rebuilds going.  Obviously you have to rebuild stuff but is there not a
way to say "go build all these packages" for me?  How does that cope
with new build dependencies?

> > Oh wait, you were trolling.
> I don't think he was, he was making a suggestion - if anything your
> post was closer to "trolling".

No, really I thought he was taking the piss but nevermind.  I may well
end up learning something from it all so it'll all be good.

Simon.

-- 
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