Gubuntu (Portage in Ubuntu) :)

[dave walker]

Gee I feel kinda late chiming in on this topic.

Well, to answer a previous post, Gentoo has 125,000 ebuilds and metadata 
files.  The each program has numerous ebuilds, so the actual packages in 
Porage is probably somewhere around 20-25000.  Being one of those 
"ex-"gentoo users/developers I have had a little bit of experience with 
Portage and the rest of Gentoo's features.  To begin, the problem with 
Gentoo, at least for me, was choice.  I had no option wheather or not to 
build from source or download a binary.  That hurts them a bit.  As for 
Portage/emerge the suite, there are a few MAJOR problems with them.  The 
first which I argued against was how they search.  For those of you who 
know Portage, searching for a package in Gentoo can be a chalenge.  Sure 
it looks pretty, but I cant simply grep for something when searching.  
The joy about FreeBSD Ports/APT is the ability for a new-ish user to 
go:   apt-cache search <something> | grep dev | grep something.  The 
second problem Portage has is how it searches.  It does not go fast.  
Portage is a very very slow program.  It my be bad programming, it may 
be because there is no central place to search.  As of when I last used 
it, there was no dependancy checking for removing packages, and yes, one 
click you can break your system fast.  The only plus to portage/emerge 
is that there are no -dev packages.  It copies the headers automagically.

(this is starting to sound like a debate :-D )

I would not like to see 'Portage' be an option for Ubuntu, with the 
obvious reason of not needing 2 package management systems.  But also 
the fact that I see no benefit to having portage in the system, there is 
nothing to gain from it being there. 


--
David Walker
Computer Science House
azrail at csh.rit.edu