On 29-Mar-07, at 11:20 PM, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
Have a look at [1] and all the open "Portage should..." bugs. Would
any of those improve the user experience for you? Can you think of
other features of a similar nature that would make your life easier?
That Portage works does not mean that it is anywhere near ideal...
Sure it's not ideal and I acknowledge that. But portage is tied very
closely to Gentoo for historical reasons, and it is not reasonable to
expect an alternate package manager to replace it (not in the near
future atleast). How about implementing the features you mention in
portage? I know what your response would be though: portage is too
much "spaghetti" code to even think about it. But guess what, if you
do succeed in making a patch that adds a feature to portage, it'll be
accepted faster than you think. Maybe, given the current situation,
that is the best way to provide a "better experience" to the users
you are so worried about; atleast for those users who don't want to
try out package managers unsupported by Gentoo.
A few years ago Gentoo had some serious advantages over the
competition. These days, Gentoo is at serious risk of being Red
Queened
by Ubuntu and Fedora. Providing the same thing that was provided two
years ago isn't enough. If Portage can't deliver functionality that
makes Gentoo competitive with where Ubuntu will be a year from now,
Portage has to be replaced.
You are comparing Gentoo with the wrong distributions. Both Ubuntu
and Fedora have people working on it 24x7, and they are being *paid*
to do so. Gentoo is a community distribution which is entirely
volunteer driven, and you can't expect it to match with the pace of
commercial distributions such as the ones you mention. Debian is a
distro you could compare with, and you'll have to accept the fact
that they develop *for* the developers, much like Gentoo.
So, really, I don't care if Ubuntu becomes more popular than Gentoo.
Isn't it already?!
Point is, the day when more than 50% of the devs feel we need a new
package manager, will be the day a replacement will be made.
Cheers,
--
Anant
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