On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 02:49:19PM +0100, Heiko Baums wrote:
Am Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:17:13 -0200 schrieb André Ramaciotti da Silva <andre.ramaciotti@gmail.com>:
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.
I don't think that you will stay too long with Gentoo. ;-)
It is right that you can reduce the dependencies a bit and that you are more flexible by setting USE flags. As far as I recall the difference between Gentoo and Arch Linux regarding the disk space is not significant if there's a difference at all, but you will need a lot more temporary disk space for compiling and it takes several days to compile the whole system and every update takes much longer than on Arch Linux. So I think "wasting" a bit disk space for dependencies which aren't needed is better than wasting too much time for compiling the whole system. That's why I switched from Gentoo to Arch Linux a while ago. On Arch Linux you still have the same control over the installed packages as you have on Gentoo. Don't overvalue the USE flags.
There's optdepends to reduce the dependencies a bit as long as a dependency can be made optionally. Otherwise more comfort for the common users is better I think.
And pacman and ABS are good as they are. There's still the NoUpgrade option in pacman.conf if you build a package from ABS.
Heiko
I know, I know, they always come back. :P My Arch installation is still in my HD, just in case. About disk usage, don't forget that arch keeps a cache of downloaded packages. So I don't think Gentoo is in disadvantage here. My installation uses 1GB less than Arch (both have basically the same packages). It may not sound like a lot, thinking of the size most HD have nowadays, but it's a 20% improvement. I don't think compiling takes that much. If you're in a hurry, then yes, it'll seem like forever. I installed in a weekend, basically the same time I took to install Arch (because I install some packages, then I remember of others, then others...). But it wasn't 48h compiling, it was way, way less. I agree that with Arch you still have control over your packages, but USE flags make it easier. Somebody already went into the ./configure of all packages and put it in an easier way to do it. If programs could talk, emerge would be like: - I want my mplayer with samba and lirc support. - OK, I'll configure it this way, but then you also need to install this and this packages. While pacman would be something like: - I want my mplayer without samba support. - Wakka wakka wakka. Make a custom PKGBUILD then, wakka wakka. And finally, yes, there are optdeps, but pacman don't handle them as nicely it handles obligatory dependencies. If I install an optdep as an explicit installed package, when I uninstall the other package, the optdep will stay in my system. If I install it as a dependency, pacman will list it as an unnecessary dependency when I run pacman -Qdt. Andre