[CentOS] Re: How to query the package owning the file? -- Emerge?

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Thu, 2005-08-04 at 00:09 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Ummm.... Ask on the distribution's mailing list???
> Or to see how resourceful you are.

Actually, this just occurred to me.  He could have been talking about
using Emerge.  It actually runs on RPM and DPKG distros (and not just
Gentoo), and it's not a bad tool for managing source.

If there is any constant in the universe, the best concepts seem to
filter into all distros.  I don't like the "choice of distros" non-sense
because it a leftover of "brand name marketing" from the commercial
world.  I like focusing on "choice of technologies," and a lot of
distros do overlap.

Of course, the guy could have been a Gentoo bigot^H^H^H^H^H marketeer.**
There are Gentoo users.  And then there are Gentoo mod-car kiddies.  And
then there are just right-out bigots.

5 years ago they would have been Debian bigots claiming that RPM is
dependency hell and bloated.  Now they are Gentoo bigots claiming even
Debian is dependency hell and bloated.

REALITY:
Ports and Packages distros have their respective places.
I use _both_ quite effectively.
Emerge could prove quite useful in managing Java, Perl, Python and other
development frameworks on Red Hat distributions, as well as getting rid
of the redistribution issues.

So he might have been legitimately looking for Emerge.  Or he could have
really hated Red Hat/Debian and think it's a better way as a distro
altogether, and wishes the company goes Gentoo.  There are a lot of them
right now (just like Debian 5 years ago).

For more, see my Blog (this is a massive 7,600 word rambling that I'm
going to "clean up" and shape into a 3,000 word article):  
  http://thebs413.blogspot.com/2005/07/linux-distributions-packages-v-ports.html  

** DISCLAIMER:  I am _both_ a Gentoo user and a 11-year FreeBSD user.
I not only wrote the appendix on [Free]BSD in Samba Unleashed which
touted its "ports" system, but I worked on that same book with Gentoo
co-founder Daniel Robbins (not personally, just as another contributing
author).  I was happy to see Daniel come up with the first major "ports"
distro in Gentoo.  So when I say 'bigot' I neither mean it to represent
all nor even a majority of Gentoo users.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith     b.j.smith at ieee.org     http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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