[ale] rpm.pbone.net

[Lightner, Jeff]

And if there were agreement on the best way to do all this there
wouldn't be so many different distros.  FOSS includes "free" including
"free" choices on how to best do things.

So in your setup does Gentoo for example include both lesstif and motif
as options from a single location or does it pick one or the other and
make you create your "overlay" for the other?   How is having to create
"overlays" better than having to choose additional repositories in the
RH model?



-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Jeff
Hubbs
Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2010 12:32 PM
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] rpm.pbone.net

On 2/17/10 9:51 AM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> Not having used Gentoo I can't really comment on its world except to
say
> that I doubt it has any all encompassing repository of every possible
> OSS any more than RedHat style distributions do.
>    
That's the basic idea, actually - it's not "every possible", of course, 
but a complete repository of packages is 106GiB (pats his 
updated-twice-a-day local repository).  We don't traffic in stacks of 
CDs or DVDs and personally I don't bother with Bittorrent.  A tens-of-MB

install cd to create an initial instance for a given architecture that 
can then be flown into various and snbdry hardware in that arch is 
plenty.  Apps for which there is no package in Portage can either be 
built from source (a fully functional build system is implicit in the 
Gentoo design) or you can fairly readily make a package yourself (in 
which case you can get it added to the repository or make an overlay for

your own use).

There is a mechanism for augmenting the repository with "overlays" - 
sometimes people create overlays for code that's developed locally, for 
instance - and there's something called "virtual packages" where, for 
instance, you have a "virtual-jdk" package that aliases to whichever JDK

you've got dialed up.  There's no GUI installer to absorb distro 
development team effort and whose intentions can be misunderstood 
(wasn't there an AIEE! INSTALLER NUKED MY DISK! message here not long 
ago?).

Overall, a great way to produce lean, efficient Linux systems.

- Jeff
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