On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 2:17 PM, André Ramaciotti da Silva <andre.ramaciotti@gmail.com> wrote:
I don't want to flame, but that's why I recently moved to Gentoo. Arch is one of the best distros I've used, but when you use a (primarily) binary distro, the number of choices you have is reduced.
I don't blame the devs, though. They must make packages that appeal to a large number of users and Arch ends up with packages with a big number of dependencies. If you think about it, using a little bit more of disk space isn't a big problem compared to the problem some people would have if the default packages weren't compiled with these extra dependencies, because they would have to compile their own packages, defeating the reason to use a binary-based distro.
I know, Arch has ABS, which is a great improvement compared to others binary-based distros, but it's still not perfect. Pacman doens't look for custom PKGBUILDs and automatically create the new packages based on them, and I guess it won't. Pacman wasn't meant to do that.
You can make scripts based on pacman and ABS that will do this (I've made one shortly before changing distros), but then I realised I don't know all the ./configure options a package has, and I find documentation on this a little scarce. Using the 'USE' flags with emerge is much simpler in this aspect.
Well yeah, if you are a dependency freak, the USE flag system address exactly that and is probably the main (and only?) reason to use Gentoo. But then I realized it did not hurt anything on my system usage to have smbclient support even though I don't need it. Maybe some day I will need that feature and I will be happy it's all already there. Or maybe I won't, but it does not matter :)