On Thursday 12 February 2004 11:19, Daniel Drake wrote: > Kevin wrote: > > Thanks for the replies, Rob. Problem is, apparently all the rsync > > mirrors (I've tried 5-10 of them now) think that 1.2.10 is the latest > > version of OpenAFS. Any idea how to point portage to the source site > > for a particular package? > > Your question has been responded too already in another part of this > thread (you can't just point portage to the source website, gentoo > needs an ebuild to know how to install it), but I thought I should > point out that all of gentoo's rsync mirrors frequently sync with each > other, so you will find that they all have exactly the same content (if > not, there will only be a ~30 minute skew max). So, there's no point > trying different rsync mirrors for an ebuild. >
Many thanks to everyone for all the thoughtful replies. Thanks especially to Lonnie and Daniel and others who pointed out the key misconception that I've been suffering from: namely, that the Gentoo meta-distribution does indeed have more in common with the other Linux distributions than is apparent at first blush. Lonnie, when I read your reply my reaction was, "Ah! So here's the fine print!" ;-> So at least in that sense (installing newly released packages), Gentoo folks have to wait for the developer/distributor/someone to put together a "package instruction kit" (ebuild) before they can use the newly released package in the nice and seamless way that portage allows (or do it yourself). In one sense at least, that's not really too different from the other distributors. With them, one has to wait until SuSE or Redhat or Debian (or whoever) assembles a new .rpm or .deb file, or do it yourself. With Gentoo, it's similar---you have to wait until someone makes a new ebuild or do it yourself. Still though, it's clear that the Gentoo software model has many major benefits over the other distributions. For one thing, if making an ebuild is alot easier than making an rpm, then the delay between a new release of some software (like OpenAFS) and the availability of it to Gentoo users through portage would tend to be smaller than for those distributions that use rpm or deb or whatever else. Not to mention the SLOT package versioning system in Gentoo which seems to have no parallel in the other distributions, and many others, I'm sure, of which I've yet to learn. Please nobody get the idea that I'm beating up Gentoo here. Far from it. I'm very impressed with it, and can see myself migrating away from SuSE and towards Gentoo because of all the benefits. But the initial impression that I had from some other Gentoo users and some of the description on the Gentoo web pages was that one could point the package management system (portage) directly to the site of the source of various packages and keep your system up-to-date that way---without waiting on the distributors to put together an rpm and integrate it into the distribution and release it on their ftp site. Not quite true: I still need to wait on an ebuild or do it myself. Ok. Misconception #1 cleared up. Thanks again for the replies. -Kevin -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
