ARTICLE - ESR gives up on Fedora

[Bill Mullen]

On Sun, 25 Feb 2007 17:22:06 -0500
"Ben Scott" <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:

>   In response to the source/binary discussion:
> 
>   Building from source *does* bypass a lot of problems.  It has been
> suggested in the past that something like a cross between BSD ports
> and RPM might be a good solution for many problems.  Something that,
> with one simple command, could automatically download all the needed
> source packages, configure, build, and install them, without scary
> looking terminal windows or the need to edit configuration files by
> hand.

Sounds like Gentoo's "Portage" system, accessible either via the CLI or by way of any of a number of GUI frontends, would appeal to you:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=2&chap=1

The simple command in question is "emerge", and anyone familiar with apt-get, urpmi or yum will find that it's very similar to all of those.

>   However, the "build most things from source" solution is not without
> issues itself.  It it slower than binary packages (imagine installing
> the first GNOME package this way -- please wait while we build the
> world from source).  It's largely incompatible with the world of
> closed-source, binary-only software.  Depending on the user, that
> might be considered a feature, or a fatal flaw.  It can also make
> testing/SCM/support a real nightmare, as now every system can have a
> slightly different configuration.

Slower, definitely, but on recent equipment sporting dual-core CPUs and acres of RAM, it's not as pokey as one might expect it to be. Gentoo also has prebuilt packages available for many apps; if patience isn't your long suit, you could install something like GNOME prebuilt and then recompile it in the background for your specific system's configuration, which pretty much gives you the best of both worlds. This is, in fact, basically how most Gentoo systems are first installed these days.

Portage accomodates binary-only packages such as Sun's JRE/JDK fairly well; the ebuild for something like that will fetch the published *.bin file in exactly the same manner as the other ebuilds would sources, and then just install from it rather than configure/build/install, while still providing full dependency management - if binary-only X requires library Y, Y is fetched and built before X is installed.

As for the differing configurations, if one adheres to the Gentoo method of using USE flags (found in /etc/make.conf) to enable/disable building in support for specific features and subsystems - as opposed to hacking on the ebuilds directly - then each system's individual configuration eccentricities can be quickly determined by a glance at that file (and frontends exist to assist one in working with these flags, as well). When reporting a bug with an ebuild, one merely also includes the USE flags that are in use on the system having the problem, and that's usually sufficient to account for these sorts of variations.

Going back to ESR's beefs, Portage is also not immune to the occasional problem with dependencies, especially if one incorporates a significant number of builds flagged as "testing" (vs. "stable"), but it has a few powerful features (such as slots, arch keywords and package masking) that together tend to keep these sorts of glitches to a minimum, IME. It's still a long ways from being something Grandma can self-admin with ease, but if she's the user and you're the remote admin - an arrangement which makes far more sense to me anyway, without regard to distro, but that there's a whole 'nother discussion - then it's pretty sweet.

-- 
Bill Mullen  moon at lunarhub.com  MA, USA  RLU #270075  MDV2007.0/MDK9.0
"In communities where men build ships for their own sons to fish or
fight from, quality is never a problem." -- J. A. Dever