RPM is the hero, not the villan

[Mark Haney]

> Tom Horsley wrote:
>> On Wed, 21 Feb 2007 16:53:11 -0800
>> John Wendel <john.wendel at metnet.navy.mil> wrote:
>>
>>> And I have a broken Ubuntu 6.10 box that was caused by updating from 
>>> a   non-ubuntu repository. They all suck! It must be a hard problem.
>>
>> I have often considered trying gentoo to see if building my own damn
>> libs and programs from source would operate better, but I have the 
>> feeling
>> that would just push the problem out to more esoteric kinds of
>> dependency issues like new compilers refusing to build old source.
> 

Here's my take on this.  I've done exactly as you considered, I built 
gentoo on my laptop and I have to say, it was _much_ easier in some 
ways, but _much harder_ in others.  By that, I mean I was always used to 
X 'just working' out of the box.  But with gentoo I had to make it work. 
  This is one of the good things about gentoo.  It makes you learn more 
about the guts of the system than you might not get with a binary 
package based distro.

The down side is the increased time it takes to update primary packages 
(although modular X has helped that alot) like KDE and OpenOffice.  But 
even then, the packages do work and work well when compiled.  As for 
your concerns about new compilers, there's no law that says you have to 
use new compilers when they are released.  In fact I'm still compiling 
using GCC 3.4.6 on this laptop and am quite happy with it.  I've heard 
stories of better performance in Gentoo with GCC 4.1.x, but my system 
screams as it is, so it's not that big a deal to me.

OTOH, it's been much more stable and usable for me in areas like 
mplayer.  I've never been able to get mplayer to behave well in Fedora 
with RPMs, that may be due to lots of things, but I do know that mplayer 
'just works' in Gentoo.

Fedora is a great OS and I use it on nearly everything else I own, I do 
like bleeding edge and I like the packaged updates.  But I don't think 
your concerns about Gentoo are all that big of a concern, IMHO.



-- 
Ita erat quando hic adveni.

Mark Haney
Sr. Systems Administrator
ERC Broadband
(828) 350-2415