OSNews: Building a Gentoo Linux for All
Sep 14, 2002, 01:00 (26 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Eugenia Loli-Queru)
"The users' main gripe (except the involved installation
process) is that Gentoo takes too long to compile either itself
(during installation) or when later compiling big packages (eg.
KDE/Gnome) or when updating the system. Installing the system,
using the Stage 1 tarball, can take from 24 hours up to 2 days,
depending on the power of your system. Also, (un)fortunately, most
packages have new ebuilds in the Portage tree every few days or
weeks, with fixed bugs. This is of course a good thing. But it is
not when you need to wait hours to recompile from scratch all these
packages every few days. And when "updating world", most of the
times it would take a while. This is a tiring process.
"Purists will say that they just leave the compilation processes
taking place overnight, but let's face it, this is hardly an
elegant solution, it does not solve the problem, it just hides it
(in the dark of the night). Developers will argue that Portage is
great for solving dependancies automatically, and I will agree with
this.
"However, on my personal experience with Gentoo since this
April, there were more than 10 distinct cases where updating the
system or libraries it broke other packages or even the system. And
at the end of the day, Portage is not an easy to use system. Sure,
'emerge -u world' or 'emerge kde' sounds like a piece of cake, and
it is a piece of cake. But when you actually get to use the system,
you will see that you need to get your nose in several /etc/
scripts or Portage's own command line arguments. Many times I had
to edit portage-related ebuild scripts or configuration files (both
on /etc/ and /usr/portage/ and elsewhere) and when it comes to the
cryptic USE command, it just becomes too complicated and too
involved for the plain user. It is just more than I would wish to
do with my system..."
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