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.ht...
** 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.