Portage replacement - choice made easy :-)
Steven,
Can it be true? My dreams for finding ${portage replacement} came true? It is so easy?
Now, while I do find a rationale in your post, let me disagree.
- Right, so you're sitting bored near you computer, and looking around for portage replacement because it doesn't do what you want. Why? Did it stop installing packages and syncing nightly? I'd really like to know what is it that you want to do, and portage doesn't allow you to.
- Right away you're starting to look for alternatives. Why? Is everything so terrible, that cannot be fixed? I can believe that this software might not be written to handle workload it now has. But still, portage 3 maybe will? A point to think, at least for me.
- Your choice of the alternative is by their Doc Language, developer's nickname and language of choice? Come on, you can do better. You say portage doesn't do what you want (say, doesn't have a feature you want), but you neglect feature comparison? Or, at least, checking that either of alternatives has the feature(s) you're looking for?
- And if both of them have that feature, does it matter, really, which one you choose? At least either will be better that portage, right?
Paludis and pkgcore teams - right on! I really like your both work (while maybe doubling the effort), I believe it is the very nature of free software - that we all can choose the best software for ourselves.
Ciaran - I don't know why someones' nick should even matter at all. I don't know what nicks most Free/Open Software developers have, but I still use it and I'm happy anyways. Besides, I know you don't care such background noise.
Just my 5 cents.
1 comment:
I haven't tried pkgcore yet, but I use Paludis as my main package manager. So, I'll answer some of your questions.
1. Of course, Portage does its main job, it syncs, install, upgrade and uninstall things. But it's far from optimal. There're a bunch of things that are not as easy as they should be with portage. For example, uninstalling unused packages, uninstalling a package along with all its dependencies, check for problems on your system (security vulnerabilities, etc)... I've been doing all those things with portage, but I needed a lot of external scripts and dirty hacks (See this post for an example of such hacks). We could talk also about some facilities like adjutrix and qualudis, but this is out of scope.
2. Portage 3 should be a full rewrite. So, is it worth to write a fourth package manager from scratch? Maybe, but who will do it?
And we better don't talk about Portage's API compared to Paludis' one.
So, Paludis is my choice. Said that, it's not a full replacement for Portage (not yet). There're still things that Portage do and Paludis don't (some are on the way).
It's okay that people use Portage. It have full support from Gentoo's devs and it's just fine for most simple tasks. But there're also lots of people which are happier with a better approach for managing their systems... and we have solid reasons, not just buzz words.
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