How do you know?

[Kevin Fries]

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Mostafa Z. Afgani wrote:
| Ow Mun Heng wrote:
| | simply wonderful. Want a program? esearch <name>, want to install?
| | emerge <name>.
|
| How's that any different from
|
| # yum info <package>
| # yum install <package>

If you have never dealt with Gentoo, its difficult to explain.  Mun
romanticizes the simplicity.  But, if you are willing to work with
Gentoo, there is a world of difference.

The concept behind Gentoo is that everything is compiled as needed.  In
THEORY, this should leave you with all the advantages of a custom build
machine, with the ease of an rpm type system.  In REALITY, its not that
easy.

Lets say you want to put up a website running apache and php.  Lets also
say you have MySQL already installed, and you wanted any program that
had MySQL extensions to be compiled with MySQL support.  You can
configure Gentoo by placing a special keyword into a configuration file,
to let emerge know that MySQL extensions should be turned on whenever a
package has it available.  PHP would be just such a package.

When you do an ebuild, it goes to a repository just like yum does.
Only, it does not pull down an executable, but instead the source
package (based upon BSD ports program).  When you "emerge php", it will
pull down php, and acknowledge that you configured MySQL to be compiled
in, and will automatically build the php services with MySQL support.
Not Postgre, MSQL, Oracle, etc, just MySQL.  Again in theory, you should
end up with a much more stable and targeted system.  When you "emerge
apache" next, it should build with the libexec module for php already in
place.

There are lots of examples where this could simplify system
administration.  SASL could be installed and configured to be used by
default.  Digest-MD5 can then easily be built on top of that.  SASL with
Digest-MD5 authentication would then be easily available for OpenLDAP.
SASL, Digest-MD5 and OpenLDAP could be automatically configured for
Postfix.  As you can see, many of the questions commonly asked in these
newsgroups would disappear in a hurry.

If this distro worked as designed, it would put Fedora to shame.  My
experiences are that too many packages get into the portage tree that do
not compile correctly.  This causes huge problems (talk about bleeding
edge!).  Also, the keyword system is not well explained to newbies, so
the first dozen or so builds will likely fall far short of the intended
nirvana.  Lastly, while all this is well and good, imagine what happens
when you need to change from MySQL to Postgre for whatever reason.  Or,
lets say that you did not include Digest-MD5 when building OpenLDAP and
Postfix.  This creates a considerable amount more work than the Fedora
yum or apt-get system.

I tried Gentoo in a production environment and liked it.  I would have
liked it much more if it came closer to its intended goals.  Maybe in a
few years they will get the bugs worked out, but until then, stick to
Fedora especially if you are fairly new to Linux.

So, now that I have turned this short answer long, hopefully you can see
that yum <package> and emerge <package> are very different.  They are
both used in the same way to accomplish the same goals, but do so in
such a different way, that they are hardly interchangeable.

- --
Kevin Fries
Network Administrator
Hydrologic Consultants, Inc of Colorado
(303) 969-8033    FAX: (303) 969-8357
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