[arch-general] conclusion: Another rant on arch way abuse and false promises

[André Ramaciotti da Silva]

On Thu, Dec 03, 2009 at 01:54:10AM +0530, Raghavendra Prabhu wrote:
> One thing I don't understand here is - why people crib that package B should
> not have feature X. If you don't want that, ABS is for that. There are
> plenty of packages which have additional dependencies like that mplayer(like
> smbclient) or vlc(hal :) or lua).
>
> (snipped)

The problem is that using ABS is impracticable if you have a big number of
custom PKGBUILDs.

OTOH, having packages with minimal dependencies isn't so great. During the
(short) time I've used Gentoo, I noticed the consume of RAM is a little
lower, but there isn't a big difference in performance. The problems arise
when you compile packages with way to minimal dependencies, and later
realize it was a mistake, and now you have to recompile lots of packages.