Gentoo

[Paul Lussier]

"Ben Scott" <dragonhawk at gmail.com> writes:

>> Emerging OpenOffice took me about 3 hours, thats on a dual-core dual
>> proc Opteron 2800SE with 4 gigs of ram.
>
>   Yikes.  I tremble to think of how long it would take on the 1200
> MHz, 256 MB box I was running at home eight months ago.  Still, that's
> useful as hard data; thanks for offering it.  :)

Heh, I'd hate to see how long that would take on my 450MHz PIII
(granted, it's a *dual* 450, but still, that's only 900MHz :)

> In short, if it sucks to be a packager, the packages will suck.  :-)

I think that's a big part of what went wrong with rpm, but in the
other direction.  They attempted to make it so trivial to be a
packager that everyone did even if they were clueless about how things
*should* be done.  There are standards, even if only defacto, that
*should* be followed and too many packagers didn't.  As a result, the
rpm world is highly fragmented to the point where rpms exist such that
they will only work on certain distros, often don't work at all, or
worse, break existing things.  And, there's no accountability or
"official" rpm resource.[1]

Of course, that's kind of what RH wanted, they couldn't package
absolutely everything, so why not make it easy for anyone to package.
Debian didn't make it quite as easy, but the one thing they put in
place was the "official" repository with some level of standards to
adhere to before your package makes it in there.  There's nothing
preventing anyone from distributing .debs, and there's nothing
preventing anyone from providing them in publicly accessible manner
such that apt-get will find them.  But most people just don't do that.[2]

Footnotes:
----------
[1] This data is based on my experiences with rpm ~5 years ago.  I
    haven't really dealt with an RPM based system since then, so this may
    be incorrect and outdated, and therefore, I maybe talking out my
    posterior oriface. If so, I apologize and will shut up now :)

[2] There are people who provide packages which can be obtained from
    non-debian related repositories and which require one to modify
    their sources.list file in order to obtain these packages.
    However, in my experience, those who provide these resources seem
    to be very clueful about packaging according to the Debian
    guidelines (An example of clueful packaging under Debian I've used
    is the multi-tty branch of GNU emacs), and thus far I have yet to
    encounter any of the problems I experienced with rpms downloaded
    off the net from the various and sundry locations like rpmfind.net
    etc.
-- 
Seeya,
Paul
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