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

[Michael J Wenk]

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 
> considering Gentoo and Debian (with the libranet installer).
> 
> A distribution specific feature I consider important is the method for 
> installing and updating software.  I know that Debian uses "apt-get", 
> and I have seen a number of posts on this list with apt-get examples. 
> Gentoo's website advertises "portage" as its method for installing and 
> updating, using the "emerge" command.
> 
> I'd like to hear (concisely) pros/cons of these two methods; whether 
> they just work, or if they require some tinkering; and the availability 
> of software through each.
> 
> Please avoid "but my distro is best" responses ;-)


Awwww, why not????


Anyways, I have been using gentoo for a few months and I for the most
part like it.  Some things don't work quite as well as they ought, but
for the most part it works awesome, and is blazingly fast.  Much much
faster than debian, and leaves poor ole Mandrake 8.2 back in the dust.  

Issues I have had with gentoo: 

Sometimes If I aggresively update the box(multiple times per day) I have
picked up buggy ebuilds, one of which was a pita to sort out.  

Apache has never quite worked as well as I want it to, mod_perl acts
even more funky than the norm. 

Last weekend, I updated and picked up a new version of dhcpd and it
changed the user the dhcpd ran under.  However the ebuild didn't work
properly, and my dhcp server would run for some time and die.  It was
easy as it turns out to fix.

Some packages have trouble with certain java jdk implementations, and
that is kinda weird. 

Config file maintainence.  I like the emerge protection of conf files.
However, it should be smart enough to know the difference between an
actual config file, vs say a startup script.  

Non portage issue, Oracle was a cast iron bitch to setup.  ALOT harder
than Mandrake was.  I know Oracle only supports redhat, but to give an
example, in order to relink the bastard, I had to downgrade my binutils
package.  That is quite the oddity. 

I have had bunch 'o crap with ~x86 ARCH tagged crap, but since you're
not supposed to mess with those unless you like dealing with crap, I
won't list em out.  

All in all, I like gentoo.  I now pretty much update every week or so(or
whenever I see a sec advisory.)  I have yet to cron it off, but
eventually I plan on it. 

Mike