A new distro in town

[TRN]

A new distro in town:Gentoo emerges victorious (http://www.linuxworld.com/2003/0516.petreley.html)

I found this article fascinating. Birdie tried installing Gentoo a few times and decided it wasn't worthwhile. I suspect it was a bit much for someone who just likes to install the OS and move on. However, the Portage packaging does sound superior to RPMs.

The heart of Gentoo is its packaging system, Portage. Portage is similar to the BSD Ports system in that it installs software by retrieiving source code and building it on your system, resolving any dependencies as necessary. If any given package is available only in binary form, Portage grabs and installs it that way.

What do you think?

Gentoo is great. Everyone should use it.

[TheWeb]

Well, I have installed Gentoo several times. It's in fact a distro for more advanced users. The installation toke a realy long time even with a mirror ftp. The last time I messed up my MBR and left with a nonworking system so I finally gave up. Buth that was only due to time lack.

I had one working system at last, just before messing up MBR with installing a package.

Buth it's for sure a distro to try for!

[Z_God]

It's pretty easy to install Gentoo, if you follow their manual. It takes a very long time though.
You can't compare portage to RPM. RPM is a package format, while portage is a package manager. There are several package managers that can use RPMs, such as Apt and Yast. Apt is also able to work with DEBs, another package format.
With RPM, you can also have source RPMs, which essentially do the same the packages in portage do.

[TRN]

It's pretty easy to install Gentoo, if you follow their manual. It takes a very long time though.
You can't compare portage to RPM. RPM is a package format, while portage is a package manager. There are several package managers that can use RPMs, such as Apt and Yast. Apt is also able to work with DEBs, another package format.
With RPM, you can also have source RPMs, which essentially do the same the packages in portage do.

Yes and No.

From www.rpm.org

The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a powerful command line driven package management system capable of installing, uninstalling, verifying, querying, and updating computer software packages.

In the sense that I used it with the above definition and the idea that Portage used ebuilds, then it may be compared to RPM. However, with the knowledge that Portage 2.1 adopts RPM format for LSB compliance then you can see there is more to the story.

:D

[Z_God]

Yeah, you're right. With RPM is it indeed very unclear. (Both a format and the command is in several ways also a package manager.) Considering RPM not to be a package manger makes things easier when comparing though.
Will Gentoo really use RPM? Wasn't that a 1 april joke?