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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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?
4. 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?

So, while I’m not really happy with portage sometimes, I’m not really in a search for replacement just yet. Maybe I’m too conservative, but that’s just me.

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.

My week with Gentoo

Ok, so few things are to be said first.

1. Blogger Beta kicks ass!! Not without few glitches, its much faster, has more features and just plain better than an old Blogger. The only problem at the moment is that Flocks’ blog editor doesn’t support it, but well, there is always online editor.
2. I had few talks with different people about my previous “weekly” post, complaining that I attack without reason and not necessarily rightfully. Although some of these comments are still do not seem right to me, I decided that it is correct in many ways, and as a future reference I do ask to provide a feedback when someone feels that I was, ahm, not exactly ok.
3. After what I said in 2), I decided to call it more simply “my week with Gentoo”.
4. I’m moving !! I have a keys to a new place, needs a lots of cleaning :-(, but I’m feeling a little depressed over how much money it will cost me. Not something impossible, just leaves less for myself.

Having these worked out, this is what I have this week:

1. Few posts about Gentoo’s past, present and some new directions. I find it really refreshing that seasoned developers, who have been around Gentoo for eternity see problems that need to be solved somehow (or worked out, choose whichever way you like). I think it is also good idea because any organization should review what the hell it does and how, and to refresh its ways from time to time.
2. There are some talks in dev community about Portage, about how it doesn’t (or does it ?) do some things well anymore (maybe it wasn’t built to scale well), and also about other package management tools. I’d suppose it should be working together with directions and “ways” chosen in 1) above, but I’m not familiar enough with any package management tool to have an opinion about internal structure. This can be either good for Gentoo, or bad – depends on how it will be implemented of course. As an initial optimist, I hope it will cause for good things.
3. There’s a new subforum on Gentoo Forums: Gentoo User Representatives. This subforum is monitored by Userreps team and is meant for all issues around Gentoo that Userreps can help you with. Start using it if you have great ideas, but mind – its not a tech support forum. Tech support threads will be moved out.
4. Xmms package was hard-masked lately, which brought to a lot of flaming on forums and bugzilla. Although opinions are split over it, I do believe that packages without a maintainer should not be in official tree. I’m not even giving a link here to any of these discussion, because there’s too much heat over it as it is. You want it – find it yourself (not that it’s hard or something).
5. Something different now. I’ve recently witnessed many developers saying they don’t care about users. Not for some user specifically, but in general. I won’t say names, because I don’t have personal issues with these developers or something, but it saddens me anyway. There’s a reason for that though – I do understand the argument, but I hoped that developers would care for a general user (not me personally) while thinking about 1) and 2) above. I still think that users are the main target, and without users (or, say, without enough happy users who are not developers) it will be worse place, not better. And I still hope that in case that 1) or 2) will be implemented in full or partially, general “user” will be considered where appropriate.

Thats what I had this week. It was pretty slow because I was kinda busy and a little depressed. Sorry.

Feedback would be greatly appreciated.