[Sussex] Debian news...

[Stephen Williams]

On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 11:22 +0100, Simon Huggins wrote:
> 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?
> 

Portage takes care of dependencies very nicely. If you do:

emerge -p somepackage

portage will list all the dependencies it will need to compile to
support somepackage. There are options to allow you to tweak this
behaviour, such as --nodeps or -e.

> 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"?

Normally each package lists a specific dependency rather than a generic
service.

> 
> 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?

You can use the --newuse option with portage to recompile packages that
are affected by changes in the USE flags, and --deep to consider all
dependent packages rather than just the immediate 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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