[olug] sparking a flame war.....

[thehaas at binary.net]

On Wed, Jun 11, 2003 at 09:20:40AM -0500, David Walker wrote:
> rpms have always worked well for me
> I have been using portage for 2 days now on one machine and it seems very easy 
> to use.  I am concerned though that I will be installing a lot of things I 
> don't mean to when they show up as a dependency.

"emerge -pu <package name>" will show all the package and dependencies
that portage will install.  To more fine-tune what portage installs,
change the USE variable in /etc/make.conf  It will take some tweaking
(like most things in Gentoo).  

See the USE docs for more info:
   http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/use-howto.xml

> The "nice" thing about rpm hell is that you always know what packages you are 
> installing on your machine because you are the one making the decision to 
> install it.

My biggest compliant on rpm's was that you are subject to the
maintainers and the platforms whims.  If you were using SuSE, for
example, and the project maintainer built the rpm for RedHat, well, it
may work on your system, but it will probably have dependencies for
RedHat package names.  You may have those packages installed, but SuSE
probably calls them something different. So you have to do a "--nodeps"
to install it.  Of course, that assumes they make an rpm at all -- if
they don't, then you have to grab the source and install if from there,
or build an rpm of your own.  Or wait until your distro makes their
package for it, which may not be until the next version (though this
might be better now with up2date, which I've never used).


My $0.02,

-- mikeh

-- 
Mike Hostetler          
thehaas at binary.net 
http://www.binary.net/thehaas 

Everything is gone;
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