On 12/13/05, Daevid Vincent <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I fully agree (and have brought this up before months and years ago) -- I > believe we should have binaries available for the big packages like KDE, OO, > Gnome, etc. Ya'll that like to waste your time compiling can keep on doing > that, while the rest of us would like to get some work done.
In practice, I think the only way this could be accomplished is if Gentoo had actual releases, due to the dependancies. For example, take KDE and X. KDE 3.5 is stabilized this week, so you download binaries of that. Now two weeks later modular X.org 7.0 is stabilized. So now you have to download all new binaries of KDE3.5 built against the new version of X.org, plus OOo, Gnome, or whatever other X packages you have installed. Then a week later a new gcc is released, and you have to go through this again, because they all depend on libstdc++. And all of these releases have to be carefully coordinated by the developers, since you can't have a binary download of the new X.org until the new KDE and GNOME builds are ready, and you have to update all of the dependency versions for every release, because now release -r2 of KDE-bin requires =xorg-server-bin-6.8.2* || =xorg-server-6.8.2*, while -r3 requires 7.0. My guess is that these binary releases wouldn't happen until a planned 'update cycle', when everything would be updated at once. And now you have the same features/problems as Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. Note that the current binary releases of OOo cheat...they install private versions of most dependancies. So the -bin comes with it's own version of python, java, libstdc++, etc. Aside from the complete waste of disk space (which is still very limited and expensive on a laptop, as you know), trying to keep up with security advisories with this approach does not sound like any fun to me. What happens if a new security bug is found is libjpeg, for example, and there are 15 different packages with private versions of libjpeg? -Richard -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
