Re: portage vs yum

[Thufir <hawat thufir gmail com>]

On Wed, 27 Jun 2007 12:10:02 -0700, Peter Gordon wrote:


>> * has only limited support for uninstalling. The biggest problem is
>> that there's no reverse-dependency tracking, you can unmerge a library
>> and it will not know there are still programs depending on it which
>> will be broken by the unmerge. This can be particularly bad on
>> upgrades: when you upgrade a library to an incompatible version (new
>> soname), it will just do it even when there are
>> still packages depending on the old version, breaking those packages.
>> And no, rebuilding everything (i.e. emerge remerge world) isn't really
>> an efficient solution to this problem.
>>
>>
> Not necessarily; Portage has a tool called "revdep-rebuild" which takes
> care of rebuilding any package which no longer has proper dynamic
> library linkage.

If a portage type system can uninstall well, and I believe that to be the 
case, that seals it for me.  The advantages of a portage type system are 
greater than those of a yum type system.

Sabayon may have screwed things up, but a system which compiles most 
things from source in a portage type way, with a few exceptions which are 
time intensive, would be easier to maintain and thus larger.  Open 
Office, the kernel, things like that could be prebuilt.

I mean this really as food for thought for you guys.  FC6 and Fedora 7 
greatly improved in terms of the ease of use of yum.  However, there's a 
FC6 yum repo and a Fedora 7 repo.  Why?  That seems like completely 
unnecessary duplication which wouldn't occur in a build-from-source 
package manager.  As a user, I hesitate to upgrade because of the lag as 
third party repos slowly catch up to Fedora versions.

Again, thank you for the lively discussion :)



-Thufir