Maybe time for a new distro?

[Bob Bell]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 11:13:58AM -0500, Randy Edwards wrote:
><babble mode=ON>
>    In my warped worldview, there are only two distros: Debian and Red Hat.
>
>    Sure, there are lots of other really slick distros (e.g. Lycoris), but 
>what I'm interested in is software -- usually the software that isn't 
>included in the distro.
>
>    If I read about something cool I want to be able to go to its web site 
>and grab it quick.  >90% of the time, it'll be packaged in only RH *.rpm 
>and/or *.deb formats (or a simple apt-get will install it because some 
>Debian developer has already packaged it).  Sure, I can d/l the tarball and 
>type "make; make install" just as well as the next person, but packages are 
>slick and were invented for a reason.  And I know about alien, but that 
>always impresses me as a kludge.

I've starting using gentoo linux at work recently (in part due to peer 
pressure).  I've found it quite remarkable how may software packages 
have ebuilds already (probably due to the ease with which an ebuild is 
created).  If you're not familiar, and ebuild is, in the roughest sense, 
a scripted "configure; make; make install" installation.  But is does 
more than that, including dependency analysis.  Installing a package is 
as simple as "emerge mypackage".  You just may need to be a little more 
patient, as the software is actually compiled on your system (things 
like distcc can help).  The flip side of that, though, is that your 
software is compiled with optimizations for your exact hardware.

Besides the whole ebuild thing, I've found it to be a pretty nice distro 
all-around.

-- 
Bob Bell