Kevin Kofler wrote:
Portage:
* parasites upstream projects for tarball downloads by default. Aside from
the
security concerns which have been raised elsewhere in this thread, this also:
- steals bandwidth from upstream projects,
- makes the user dependent on the upstream project's server being up (for
every
single upstream project) and still carrying the file they want (which isn't
always the case, many upstream projects delete old versions, they don't have
infinite webspace nor do they want people to download old buggy versions).
So this really doesn't scale. It also doesn't comply with the GPL when
distributing binaries. SRPMs carry the full source code.
Erm; No. Gentoo's portage mirrors have a "distfiles" directory that
contains
copies of all source tarballs for current versions of Portage packages. When
one installs the package (via "emerge app-foo/bar" as root or similar), it
attempts to download the tarball from this distfiles mirror. Only if it fails
on multiple mirrors (or as is configured otherwise in /etc/make.conf) does
it attempt to grab the sources from the upstream download location.
* has only limited support for uninstalling. The biggest problem is
that
there's no reverse-dependency tracking, you can unmerge a library and it will
not know there are still programs depending on it which will be broken by the
unmerge. This can be particularly bad on upgrades: when you upgrade a library
to an incompatible version (new soname), it will just do it even when there
are
still packages depending on the old version, breaking those packages. And no,
rebuilding everything (i.e. emerge remerge world) isn't really an efficient
solution to this problem.
Not necessarily; Portage has a tool called "revdep-rebuild" which takes care
of rebuilding any package which no longer has proper dynamic library linkage.
RPMs do allow you to build from source, that's what specfiles and
SRPMs are
for. Writing your own specfile is not fundamentally different from writing
your own portage recipe.
I concur with this. The first few RPM packages that I created were based
quite heavily on Gentoo's ebuilds (not "recipes" - those are rPath/Conary)
for them. I still use them from time to time to help track weird/unexpected
dependencies.
--
Peter Gordon (codergeek42)
This message was sent through a webmail
interface, and thus not signed.