Re: portage vs yum

[Kevin Kofler <kevin kofler chello at>]

Peter Gordon <peter <at> thecodergeek.com> writes:
> Erm; No. Gentoo's portage mirrors have a "distfiles" directory that contains
> copies of all source tarballs for current versions of Portage packages. When
> one installs the package (via "emerge app-foo/bar" as root or similar), it
> attempts to download the tarball from this distfiles mirror. Only if it fails
> on multiple mirrors (or as is configured otherwise in /etc/make.conf) does
> it attempt to grab the sources from the upstream download location.

At least Gentoo tries to mirror the sources (still, why not fetch them _only_ 
from the distfiles mirrors?), other source-based distributions won't even 
bother doing that.

> Not necessarily; Portage has a tool called "revdep-rebuild" which takes care
> of rebuilding any package which no longer has proper dynamic library linkage.

Oh, I didn't know about that tool. But why do you have to do that by hand? It 
should be automatic. Yum or apt won't update a library without also updating 
the applications which depend on it to versions built against the correct 
library.

> I concur with this. The first few RPM packages that I created were based
> quite heavily on Gentoo's ebuilds (not "recipes" - those are rPath/Conary)

I don't know why I couldn't remember the specific term, I knew it of 
course. :-) But ebuilds, specfiles etc. are all "recipes". ;-)

        Kevin Kofler