[Sussex] Debian news...

[Geoffrey J. Teale]

Simon Huggins <huggie at earth.li> writes:
>
> I didn't think gentoo had packages just files that told you how to build
> things?

No, e-builds are more like a suped up version of the  *BSD ports
system.  They know just as much about dependencies as .deb packages do.

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

Yup the "requires" part you talk about it is the ebuild. 

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

Yes, they have virtual packages.

> 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?

I'm not sure what you're saying?

> 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.

Stephen genuinely likes Gentoo, his suggestion was a valid one.  Right
now Gentoo is probably a great distro for the AMD64 if you're prepared
to wait for all the compiling involved.  I found it pretty simple to put
Gentoo on my UltraSparc as well (as time wasn't an issue it was
actually less effort to build it with Gentoo than it was to try and
work out why the hell Debian didn't even begin to work).  As it turns
out I've ended up with OpenBSD there, but for other reasons. 

I'd probably plump for Ubuntu if I had an AMD64 and I just wanted to
get it working quickly.

-- 
Geoff Teale
CMed Technology            -   gteale at cmedresearch.com
Free Software Foundation   -   tealeg at member.fsf.org