one advantage that other binary based package managers have over Gentoo is ease of recovery from broken core packages ... break your gcc ? no problem ! simply do `apt-get install gcc` or `rpm -i gcc` or whatever
my proposal is to implement a new utility (called 'erescue' for lack of a better name) that is written in C and designed to be statically linked ... then next time you break a core system package which cannot be recovered by simply running `emerge` a few times, you run `erescue <broken package>` for example, when i broke binutils in unstable with a gcc4 patch, i noticed that it's hard for users to *easily* recover from this ... we developers end up scrambling to build a bunch of binary packages for a variety of compatible compiler/libc combinations so the user can just wget the file and run `emerge binutils.tbz2` and be on their way the packages that would be eligible for an 'erescue' package would be just about everything when you do `USE=-* emerge system -ep` ... i'm sure we can trim many of those out though :) maybe even create a new USE flag for some of these core packages so that we can trim out more files the idea would be to create very bare min packages so that the user can simply 'rescue' themselves ... after that, they it's up to them to re-emerge the package to apply all their fun ricer-optimizations as they see fit i dont think it'd be too hard to integrate this 'rescue set' into a catalyst target so that it'll become part of our normal release schedule of stage tarballs -mike -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
