- The Gentoo Fork – Its been rumored, and its even been attempted at least once I believe, but it has yet to happen. Personally I think some home grown competition would do Gentoo well. Would I switch if they forked? Maybe… They’d need a new tree, a replacement for the ebuild, a replacement for portage. They’d need at least a handful of very skilled technical people, and another handful of people to do all the non-technical work. Could easily be done in my opinion, only a lack of desire is really staving it off. Perhaps this is a sign Gentoo isn’t as bad off as some like to think.
- The Portage Replacement – We’ve got at least two contenders. Both are probably, at this point, more than able to do the job. Both are without a doubt a better system with more modern approaches to package management. Only nostalgia is really holding this one back. Sort of sad really.
- Graphical Package Management – Despite actually having several of these out there for Portage there is a pretty good reason why these never really caught on with John Doe Gentoo. Mainly they’re not really a good idea. Sadly running a system like Gentoo just involves to much command line work to make these really worth using. Using one would only mean having to switch back to the command line every other install to check and fix the reason(s) it failed or to update my conf files. Pointless…
Your picks?
Enjoy the Penguins!
4 Comments
@1: We’ll see how that one will work. Forks can be good, either cause something better comes along or cause the old thingy improves. The users basically can’t lose
@2: Well both work as package managers but they are not compatible (like Patrick Lauer’s posts have shown). So I think we should stick to emerge for a while, especially since it’s not as slow as some people seem to think it is.
@3: Graphical package management? Overrated. I didn’t even use the graphical things in ubuntu installation cause the command line works better and faster.
pkgcore generally works like portage, the only major differences for me are the lack of an emerge.log file and it ignores your environment (USE=foo emerge bar) and only listens to config files.
You wouldn’t need a new package manager or ebuild replacements to fork Gentoo. That would actually make a fork significantly harder than it has to be. It’s easier to be a derivative-like fork a la Ubuntu that gradually takes over independent maintenance of packages but still keeps using the same package manager.
Berkholz: I don’t necessarily agree with you. Moving away from the ebuild and portage would not be as difficult as it would just be time consuming. Paludis (and probably pkgcore as well) could, without to much effort, be converted to use a new format. The only real big hurdles would be decieding a on new format, the physical act of rewriting the current ebuilds. The second part could possibly be automated… depending on how much really changes.
> Well both work as package managers but they are not compatible (like Patrick Lauer’s posts have shown).
Patrick is a filthy liar.