[vox-tech] gentoo's "portage" vs. debian's "apt-get"

[Ken Bloom]

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On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 09:06:14AM -0800, Jonathan Stickel wrote:
> It is time for me to move away from RedHat.  At the moment, I am=20
> considering Gentoo and Debian (with the libranet installer).
>=20
> A distribution specific feature I consider important is the method for=20
> installing and updating software.  I know that Debian uses "apt-get",=20
> and I have seen a number of posts on this list with apt-get examples.=20
> Gentoo's website advertises "portage" as its method for installing and=20
> updating, using the "emerge" command.
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> I'd like to hear (concisely) pros/cons of these two methods; whether=20
> they just work, or if they require some tinkering; and the availability=
=20
> of software through each.
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> Please avoid "but my distro is best" responses ;-)

I use Debian, and I find that apt-get does an excellent job of=20
dependancy management, partly because of the ability of apt-get and=20
partly because of Debian's packaging policy.=20

If you are using Debian stable or Debian testing, then you will always=20
be able to install any package in the Debian repository using apt-get. =20
If you are using Debian unstable, this is where developers sort out=20
package dependancies, so it doesn't always work as well as in testing or=20
stable, but I've only had packages wind up on hold (because they don't=20
have the appropriate dependancies) or had packages that apt-get wanted=20
to remove that I wanted to keep about 3 to 5% of the time.

The disadvantage is that software in stable is frozen as-of the last=20
release 15 months ago. Software form unstable is moved into testing=20
according to rules approximately as follows:
 * package has been in Testing for 10 days
 * package has been compiled for all 11 architectures
 * package has less (or equal) release critical bugs than the one in=20
   testing already
 * all of the dependancies of this package are in testing, and the=20
   package will not break dependancies of a package already in testing=20
   (unless that package will be upgraded at the same time)
The net effect of this is that package is about 15 to 20 days old, but=20
some more important packages can hold up a lot of packages from entering=20
testing. (For example, glibc updates in unstable can keep packages from=20
entering testing for a long time until glibc gets upgraded in testing,=20
another example is the Gnome-1 to Gnome-2 upgrade where Gnome-2 had to=20
be pretty much completely working before any of it entered testing -=20
that took months.)


Debian has a very good bug-tracking system. Just use the reportbug=20
command in the reportbug package, and you can submit a bug and you will=20
be emailed with all of the discussions. You don't need a login like for=20
bugzilla, just submit and get tracking information. Look at=20
bugs.debian.org to see how this works.

A downside: there's no corporation behind Debian, so some complex things=20
can take a long time to get upgraded. They're still testing out XFree=20
4.3 for example, not yet ready to upload it into Debian/unstable.

--=20
I usually have a GPG digital signature included as an attachment.
See http://www.gnupg.org/ for info about these digital signatures.
My key was last signed 10/14/2003. If you use GPG *please* see me about=20
signing the key. ***** My computer can't give you viruses by email. ***

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