How do you know?

[Ow Mun Heng]

On Sat, 2005-01-08 at 02:40, Kevin Fries wrote:
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> Mostafa Z. Afgani wrote:
> | Ow Mun Heng wrote:
> | | simply wonderful. Want a program? esearch <name>, want to install?
> | | emerge <name>.
> |
> | How's that any different from
> |
> | # yum info <package>
> | # yum install <package>
> 

> The concept behind Gentoo is that everything is compiled as needed.  In
> THEORY, this should leave you with all the advantages of a custom build
> machine, with the ease of an rpm type system.  In REALITY, its not that
> easy.

I agree with you there, but only because I'm a reasonable person. I
wouldn't recommend a newbie to work with gentoo. Even after using linux
a couple of years, I sometimes find myself at a loss at configuring some
stuffs in Gentoo. The reason being that usage of Fedora/RH more or less
just made a dummy out of me. A lot of things are taken for granted.

> If this distro worked as designed, it would put Fedora to shame.  My
> experiences are that too many packages get into the portage tree that do
> not compile correctly.  

There are a few of those, not a lot if you talk about servers though.
But for desktops, yeah. It takes some getting used to.

> This causes huge problems (talk about bleeding
> edge!).  

Ah.. but what you do get is none of the legacy stuffs. You virtually do
not need to reinstall your OS from scratch nor have the problem of
fixing an upgrade.


> imagine what happens
> when you need to change from MySQL to Postgre for whatever reason.  Or,
> lets say that you did not include Digest-MD5 when building OpenLDAP and
> Postfix.  This creates a considerable amount more work than the Fedora
> yum or apt-get system.

Dude... that's a overstatement. When you do decide to change over, even
in Fedora, you _will_ have problems. Eg: Postfix is not compiled with
Mysql support in FC3, if needed, one will still have to re-compile it.

Under Gentoo, this is easily controllable and all the user needs to
understand is how to use the "USE" flags.



> I tried Gentoo in a production environment and liked it.  I would have
> liked it much more if it came closer to its intended goals.  

Sad to say, I didn't read that bit. I migrated since oct last year. Can
you explain?


> Maybe in a
> few years they will get the bugs worked out, but until then, stick to
> Fedora especially if you are fairly new to Linux.

Yes.. I agree. Unless you really want to understand the linux system.
It's one up from Linux From Scratch. It'll satisfy your desire to learn.

-- 
Ow Mun Heng
Gentoo/Linux on DELL D600 1.4Ghz 
98% Microsoft(tm) Free!! 
Neuromancer 00:15:57 up 3:22, 2 users, 
load average: 0.36, 0.26, 0.42