portage vs yum

[Patrice Dumas]

On Wed, Jun 27, 2007 at 08:30:22PM +1000, Michael Fleming wrote:
> 
> Someone still has to maintain the port, and that would consume the same
> amount of time and effort as maintaining an RPM as far as I can see it.
> No win there..

In fact, it seems to me that the real main difference between sabayon
(gentoo) and fedora is not the port system. One could imagine a port
system for for fedora/rpm too, maybe this allready exists, something 
like:

* get all the specfiles from a directory with specfiles
* find out the build and runtime dependencies by parsing the spec files
  and construct a tree of needed build
* use spectool -g on the spec file, or get it from a lookaside cache
* rpmbuild -ba


In my opinion the real difference regarding packaging is that the gentoo
ebuilds are much simpler than the specfiles because:

* there is no package split in gentoo
* gento follows upstream even more closely than fedora, there is no
  real integration

The result is that it is certainly much easier to write ebuilds, that
certainly explains for a part why there are more packages. The number
of packagers and the time they dedicate to building packages would be
the other parameter. These are numbers that is not easily found.

Regarding the number of packages, it seems to me that gentoo and debian
or ubuntu have more packages than Fedora. But Fedora was really opened 
only recently to the community, and the number of packages is growing 
steadily, so it is possible that one day Fedora collection grows to 
the gentoo or debian/ubuntu level.

One advantage of Fedora over gentoo or debian is that there are paid
redhat people for the maintainance of the most difficult and moving 
packages, like firefox, gcc, kernel, glibc, and so on....

--
Pat