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Gentoo should not get all the press

   Thu, 21 Oct 2004 08:48:02 -0400
   linuxham ([28]linuxham from wowway.com)
   Answered By Raj Shekhar, Thomas Adam, Mike Orr, Jason Creighton

   [29]Debian, ahhh Debian. Don't care about any cutesy install, easy enough
   IMHO.

     [Mike] I managed to stay out of this thread so far because the author is
     so closed-minded, but just to set the facts straight, Gentoo's install is
     less cutesy than Debian. No curses dialogs to guide you through. There is
     one little dialog program you can run to configure the network, but it's
     optional. Everything else is done by hand the old-fashioned way or by
     running little console programs. What more do you want?

     [Jason] Alternatively phrased, what less do you want?

     For instance, the only thing in the Crux install that doesn't happen on
     the command line is a curses-based package selection program. Everything
     else (creating the target filesystem, mounting it, installing a bootloader
     if you need to, etc.) you did yourself.

     Which, oddly enough, I found to be simpler than trying to figure out how
     someone else designed an installer.

     I had not realized that Gentoo had a minimal install. Sounds like I might
     like it. (If only I had the bandwidth...)

     [Mike] Gentoo is not the first or only compile-it-yourself distro, but it
     happens to be the one that's supported enough to make a lot of first-time
     compile-distro  users try it out. So it's creating a "market" for a
     different  kind of distribution. Something like that deserves press
     coverage. Will it remain in that privileged position forever? Probably
     not. I first encountered [30]Red Hat some months after it appeared when a
     guy recommended it saying, "These guys actually test their distribution."
     RH brought a new level of quality control to Linux, which [31]SuSE and
     others then stepped up to compete with. No doubt other distros modelled
     after BSD ports will appear too, and the binary distros may start focusing
     more on their (already existing) option of letting users install from
     source if they wish.

     Rock Linux is another compile-it-yourself distro, and last time I looked
     at it, it had an install similar to Gentoo's. You might also look at
     [32]Slackware, which is more simplistic than Debian (and I mean that in a
     good way), although it's more cutesy than Gentoo.

   Gonna stick with it because 

   1. It is FREE, never gonna have to pay for it in any way, really a strange
   concept... 

     [Mike] Gentoo is free, and Rock and Slackware and Fedora and...

     [Raj] ...so is the Mandrake Community Edition (it lacks the acrobat
     reader, crossover office and other proprietary stuff)

   2. APT works sooo well. Just install Woody base, set sources to testing, and
   invoke aptget ugrade dist to get Sarge installed. Then aptget for whatever
   else over the net 

     [sic] folks. Debian's actual command (to do mass upgrades without breaking
     holds or allowing package removals for apps that changed drastically) is:
     apt-get upgrade dist -- Heather

     [Raj] You can do that with yum too. MDK provides rpmuri (might have got
     the name wrong). I am surprised that people still complain about the RPM
     dependency hell. Then there are some people who can run apt on redhat too,
     but I have not looked at it.

     [Mike]  Debian can justly be proud of its pioneering work in distro
     technology.   It   was   the  first  distro  to  create  a  package
     searcher/downloader like apt, a program many of the RPM-based distros have
     now adopted. Debian was also the first with individually-upgradeable
     packages (the dpkg system), although rpm came out not long after. I think
     Debian was also the first distro with dependencies.

     But these all must be weighed against the much larger set of quirky Debian
     technologies and policies which have not been universally adopted. Debian
     has very specific and complicated policies for how software must be
     packaged, which files go where, how the application must behave, etc --
     these  policies fill two whole books (the Debian Policy Manual, the
     Developer's Reference, and we should add the New Maintainer's Guide and
     the smaller doucments: Emacs policy, Perl policy, Spelling Dictionaries
     and Tools policy, etc). These provide a steep learning curve for package
     maintainers, as well as for those who just want to use dpkg for their own
     private software. Automated tools exist now to help with this, but they do
     so much magic it can be hard to figure out what all they're doing. Last
     time I tried to build a package, you even had to make a PGP key to sign it
     with, as if that's necessary for private packages. All this complication
     regularly results in (1) Debian packages with broken dependencies: e.g.,