Gentoo patches [was Re: [CLUE-Tech] Escape from RH 8.0]

[Collins]

On Sunday 02 March 2003 12:49 pm, David Anselmi wrote:
> Collins wrote:
> [...]
>
> > A little bit <OT>, since I can't help you with the RH RPM-Hell or
> > GUI-hell, but at this point in such a query I usually ask myself, why
> > would anyone want to run anything but gentoo?
>
> Looking for a religious argument?  Please move that to CLUE-Talk.
>

I am never looking for a religious argument.  I have nothing against RH or 
Debian or pick-a-distro, its just that I find most of what I want to do so 
much easier on gentoo.  Debian would come in a close second (IMO) for ease of 
use, although the Debian concept of "stable" eliminates a lot of useful and 
quite stable current packages.

I don't bring up my personal preferences often.  Usually I just shake my head 
in silence.

> Since you bring it up, suppose I have a patch that gentoo doesn't.  How
> hard is it to get a patched version of the package installed?
>

I'm not really familiar with the procedure (don't need it myself), but it is 
possible to download the source, unpack it, make modifications, then continue 
with the build.  Mostly people use the high level 'emerge' command which 
automates the entire process of fetching, compiling, and installing a 
package.  The low level 'ebuild' command provides the 'fetchonly' and 
'unpack' options.  There is considerable documentation for portage (the 
package management system), but I'm not sure everything is spelled out as a 
canned procedure, since what you are looking for is considerably out of the 
mainstream.  You would need to take aditional steps (documentation exists) to 
protect your package from being overlaid (and your patches dropped) by 
subsequent maintenance.

Another approach (if your patch is not purely personal) would be to learn the 
portage system, make an ebuild (i.e. the package specs) that incorporates the 
patch, and submit your ebuild to gentoo bugzilla for use by others.  Making 
an ebuild is not a lot more difficult than making an RPM package.

> I'm trying this on Debian right now.  It is easy to build a binary
> package from the source package but I'm not sure how it will work to
> patch the source package first.  Looks easy but I also expect problems
> in the long term from installing a custom package this way.  I haven't
> seen a clear explanation of the Right Way(tm) to do this.
>
> Gentoo looks like an interesting distro, mostly because it handles a
> problem I'm having on Debian at the moment.  I hope I can find time to
> try it out.
>

My brief experiance with Debian led me to believe that the bootscripts and 
placement of files in /etc were much more difficult to understand with Debian 
than either RH or gentoo.  I could never seem to figure out how it all worked 
on Debian.

-- 
Collins Richey - Denver Area
Athlon-XP gentoo 1.4_rc2 kde 3.1