[PLUG] Package management (was : Q: comparison of video formats)

Felix Lee felix.1 at canids.net
Fri Sep 5 11:42:02 UTC 2003


Brent wrote:
> Why do you prefer to manually manage dependencies and compile from
> source?

Dependencies in portage are as automatic as any binary package
system, and a little more flexible.

One of the reasons I installed Gentoo is I found that, for me,
binary-based distributions were encouraging bad habits.  I no
longer had any intuitive feel for the size or complexity of any
piece of software I was using.  I was falling into black-box
debugging helplessness.  I was getting locked into finding and
installing exact version numbers of shared libraries.  I was
running out-of-date software simply because it wasn't easy to
upgrade just one thing, I'd have to upgrade the whole system
because of all the interrelated dependencies.  etc.

After installing Gentoo... I've discovered I need a _lot_ more
disk to do a debuggable source-based installation these days.
And more ram and cpu power would help for building all those
things that want to compile with -O3 or so.
--




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