On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 10:08:34PM +0530, Sriram Narayanan wrote: > - There is only so much that one can patiently wait for.. emerging for > hours together waiting for a simply ruby executable is something that > a developer cannot tolerate. > - Emerging source over a 128/256 kbps line is even more time in case > of software such as multimedia players, will take even longer time :(
Both true for a general-purpose machine. Gentoo is really, in spite of the efforts of the developers, only for someone who wants to have almost complete control over what is on the system while still not being bothered with having to download and compile every single component by hand. It really is not a general/casual user system. And if you are using it for shipping pre-built binary packages, it has no real advantage over Apt. I still have Gentoo boxes at home which use Blackbox as the desktop and do not have Gnome (obviously) or even KDE, and none of the other apps on the system even have support built in for these. No useless Gnome crud hanging around. For me, it was worth the effort of setting up just for that, but for most people, it would be an utter waste of time. > But while I love emerge as a techie, I also realize that emerge is not > always end user and bandwidth and CPU friendly (in terms on resources > needed to build). True. The systems I have at home keep themselves up-to-date, pick up and compile stuff at night and even rebuild kernels. I just need to throw a switch when it says it has a new kernel ready once in while. Have only broken the box twice in the last 5-6 years! :) But honestly, it does take more effort than just using Ubuntu and is definitely not worth the trouble for most users. Still think it is worth checking out how the OpenSolaris port of portage is doing. No reason why this can not be a subordinate package manager on Belenix, if someone is interested and willing to take the effort of maintaining a source-based system. I'm sure I'm not the only control freak around! :) Venky.
