On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 11:14 PM, Arne Babenhauserheide <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote:
> Am Donnerstag 06 November 2008 15:53:53 schrieb Sergiu Ivanov:
> > > And since ebuilds are very easy to maintain, it's far easier to keep a
> > > system
> > > current with them.
> >
> > Is there any advantage over Debian binary packages when using ebuilds?
>
> Generally, updating an application is only a matter of renaming the ebuild
> file to the version of the application.
>
> But that also means, every user has to compile the applications himself (I
> like that, but it takes some processing time).
>
I see. It seems to me that this necessity won't be very repellent, so
it doesn't look like a problem. Especially for Gentoo folks ;-)
> > Note that I have no special preferences with debs and I'm not sitting
> > on a Debian system. What I pursue with this question is whether a
> > Gentoo GNU/Hurd would be easier to maintain up-to-date with usual
> > Gentoo repositories and whether it would be possible to avoid
> > situations like we are in at the moment: some packages are broken and
> > a lot of stuff does not work (emacs, for example).
>
> If we get maintainers for the Hurd stuff, then yes.
>
> But for that we'd still need people who maintain them, and thought it's far
> less work than doing a deb package (just rename the file), the update still
> has to be tested, so someone has to build it which takes about the same
> time
> as making the deb package.
>
> So I assume the main advantage is the high geek concentration in the Gentoo
> community :)
>
OK, this sounds pretty interesting :-) As soon as there are more
geeks, there might be more (possible) developers and more bug reports,
which is good :-)
> > BTW, I once tried to build emacs from source on Hurd and the attempt
> > failed. I used to think that if I have the source code of a program
> > for Linux, not using some kernel interfaces, I could easily build it
> > on the Hurd, but it proved to be false...
>
> The emacs ebuild is quite complex, so I can well imagine that building it
> isn't that simple... (I attached the ebuild, maybe it can give you a look
> on
> the difficulty inherent to emacs - the ebuild is one with useflags ("I want
> that feature, but don't want this one") and custom patches).
>
I see... Well, I hope I'll have some time to port emacs to Hurd,
because, frankly speaking, it's uncomfortable for me to realize that
*GNU* Emacs does not run on *GNU* Hurd...
Thank you for information :-) I've looked into the ebuilds, BTW, and
they look quite intuitive. As I said on IRC once, I tried Gentoo and I
liked it, and studying these two ebuilds in detail made me like it
even more ;-)
Still, Gentoo GNU/Hurd remains just a possibility, so at the moment
most attention had better be paid to Debian GNU/Hurd, as you said
before.
Regards,
scolobb
