Re: [tlug] Looking for a distribution to replace Ubuntu

[Edward Middleton <emiddleton@example.com>]

Nguyen Vu Hung wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 11:57 AM, Edward Middleton
> <emiddleton@example.com> wrote:
>   
>> Nguyen Vu Hung wrote:
>>     
>> Thats why meta-distributions like Gentoo work so well.  I have 188
>> ebuilds for things that are either not supported or not compiled and
>> installed the way I want them.  This gives me the advantage of not
>> having to maintain the things I don't care about while not having to
>> abandon package management for the things I need to support.
>>     
> Are you talking about "metabuild" in ebuild?
> It is a great feature that both RPM and DEB don't have.
>   

I was referring to portage the Gentoo build system/package manager.  I
referred to it as a meta-distribution because source packages are
generally compiled and installed by the user so there aren't
distribution packages as such.

> I *sometimes* build customization rpms for food and profit and found
> that the RPM dependency in rpmbuild is a nightmare, especially when
> the package we are going to build has a bunch of "Requires:".
>
> The problem becomes more serious at end-users who is going to build rpm with -i.
>   

I have had to do this in the past for RHELL/CentOS and also on occasion
Debian source builds but it takes far longer and breaks more often. 
Gentoo ebuilds usually don't take much longer then setting up without
package management so it is worth the extra effort.

> Gentoo is nice. But I won't switch to it until it reaches some
> attention at business level.
>   

Like RHEL ;)

Edward