My Gentoo rant

[Walking Tree]

Why do none of you apply for official AA pkg maintainership position? :p

Because none of use use frugalware. Yet. Give me 48 hours

well, 32-bit mode is a feature of my CPU and there's nothing I can do about it, and I'm happy to use it for flash (after the recent disappearance of the win32codecs problem, that's really all that's left incompatible that I actually use)

[Luke-Jr]

Why do none of you apply for official AA pkg maintainership position? :p

Because none of use use frugalware. Yet. Give me 48 hours

wtf does that mean? What I meant was, why don't any of you(people making packages for Arma for your fav OS) apply to be official Armagetron package maintainers(and upload them to beta.aa.net)

well, 32-bit mode is a feature of my CPU and there's nothing I can do about it,

Except pretend it doesn't exist.

[Z-Man]

The upgrade policy.

Planned solution for Utopios: Allow installing the different versions side-by-side any only remove the old one when the replacement is binary compatible, or nothing else needs it.

That's what I do with gentoo, too; I disabled automatic cleaning. You get a warning, though, but at least the system then only breaks when you manually clean out the old stuff. It still breaks, though.

Dependency gridlock.

I enjoy use of --nodeps on occasion.

I trust that if a dependency is listed, it really is a dependency and if I ignore it, bad stuff happens as well.

Old versions of packages disappear really fast from the portage tree.

FEATURES=buildpkg
emerge -K program

Umm, does that really help? Doesn't portage only install stuff with an ebuild in the portage tree?

Well, Utopios might be usable sooner with more hands/heads working on it

A great suggestion for someone who wants to get away from managing system internals.

Debian based systems, with external repositories to work around the Free Software only restriction, look most promising;

You do realize Debian has a nonfree repository?

Yeah, but it's unsupported and second class citizen. Yeah, I picked the wrong word.

[Luke-Jr]

Dependency gridlock.

I enjoy use of --nodeps on occasion.

I trust that if a dependency is listed, it really is a dependency and if I ignore it, bad stuff happens as well.

Well, don't ignore it; just use it to break out of the gridlock. In particular, --nodeps ignores blocking.

Old versions of packages disappear really fast from the portage tree.

FEATURES=buildpkg
emerge -K program

Umm, does that really help? Doesn't portage only install stuff with an ebuild in the portage tree?

Pretty sure you can use -K to force installing a package.

Debian based systems, with external repositories to work around the Free Software only restriction, look most promising;

You do realize Debian has a nonfree repository?

Yeah, but it's unsupported and second class citizen. Yeah, I picked the wrong word.

Well, then just stick with Free software

[Z-Man]

I enjoy use of --nodeps on occasion.

I trust that if a dependency is listed, it really is a dependency and if I ignore it, bad stuff happens as well.

Well, don't ignore it; just use it to break out of the gridlock. In particular, --nodeps ignores blocking.

Well, the build will still fail if the dependency is there for a reason, and it's still manual intervention where there shouldn't be one, at least when automatic cleaning of old packages is enabled.

Pretty sure you can use -K to force installing a package.

Indeed, it works! Those packages aren't plain tarballs, they seem to contain the necessary meta information in blocks after the tarball. There's even the ebuild in there, so for the case that you need to rebuild the package (say, a dependency has changed in a non binary compatible way), you can.

Hmm, the possibility to revert the system to a known working state may just be enough to keep me with Gentoo, I'll have to see Is there a ready-made tool that manages the binary packages? I don't want to keep them forever, I need to protect them from getting overwritten by new builds of the same version, and I want them to be kept available for at least some time after an upgrade. If not, no worries, it sounds like an easy job for a shell script.

Hey, there's more! quickpkg generates packages from what you have installed. So you can make a snapshot of your system just before you update it. I hope I have the disk space.

[Luke-Jr]

I trust that if a dependency is listed, it really is a dependency and if I ignore it, bad stuff happens as well.

Well, don't ignore it; just use it to break out of the gridlock. In particular, --nodeps ignores blocking.

Well, the build will still fail if the dependency is there for a reason, and it's still manual intervention where there shouldn't be one, at least when automatic cleaning of old packages is enabled.

I was referring to block-depends anyway.

Pretty sure you can use -K to force installing a package.

Indeed, it works! Those packages aren't plain tarballs, they seem to contain the necessary meta information in blocks after the tarball. There's even the ebuild in there, so for the case that you need to rebuild the package (say, a dependency has changed in a non binary compatible way), you can.

Yep.

Hmm, the possibility to revert the system to a known working state may just be enough to keep me with Gentoo, I'll have to see Is there a ready-made tool that manages the binary packages? I don't want to keep them forever, I need to protect them from getting overwritten by new builds of the same version, and I want them to be kept available for at least some time after an upgrade. If not, no worries, it sounds like an easy job for a shell script.

No clue, buildpkg itself has worked good enough for me. I also have keeptemp and keepwork.

Hey, there's more! quickpkg generates packages from what you have installed. So you can make a snapshot of your system just before you update it. I hope I have the disk space.