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

[Collins]

On Sunday 02 March 2003 09:59 pm, Adam Bultman wrote:
> > > 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?
>
> Not to perpetuate the could-be war here, but Gentoo's portage system does
> have a few bugs in it. I can't currently emerge cups, as it's busted.
> There's a few other things that are broken, but man. I like it 	*so* much
> better than debian. Whoo!  I have debian at work (and my gentoo
> workstation replaced my debian workstation) and it's a lot better.   I
> adore the portage system.  I run gentoo on my web/mail/db server ath ome,
> and it's been wonderful.  It's nice.  I almost prefer it over slackware
> (which is my all time fav so far).x
> _______________________________________________

No war on my part.  I like to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Gentoo 
like any other distro has occasional glitches.  If you know a perfect distro, 
I'd like to hear about it!  Personally, I always delay any portage updates 
for a few weeks, and over the past 3 years I've avoided 3 really nasty bugs 
in doing so.

CUPS in the past few releases (IMO) is a big piece of crap.  It used to work, 
but then they started screwing around with the ghostscript support, and since 
then I've nevery gotten it to work.  It emerges just fine, and I can 
configure a printer, but nothing ever comes out of the printer (two different 
printers).  Once I fixed the problem by getting a very specific ghostscript 
version directly from the CUPS site, but now I don't bother.  I just use 
lprng and life is good.

BTW, Slackware is a fine distro.  I have the same problem with it that I have 
with Debian.  I don't really understand the (from my standpoint) very 
non-standard bootscripts and /etc usage, and to be fair I haven't made the 
effort to understand.  There is also the problem of finding suitable packages 
or rolling your own package management system.

Gentoo is also somewhat unique with respect to bootscripts, but I find it 
easier to understand.

With gentoo, when packages fail to emerge, there are at least two 
possibilities:

1) the gentoo ebuild (package specs) is borken
2) this version of the upstream source package itself is borken
3) both of the above 

Usually, the gentoo developers are quite responsive, if you submit a bugzilla 
report.  I've seen turnaround in as little as three hours.

Just to reemphasize my position.  I'm always ready to discuss gentoo or other 
distro, but I have no desire for religion or war.  It's all linux, and that's 
what counts.

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