On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 2:17 PM, André Ramaciotti da Silva <andre.ramaciotti@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I don't want to flame, but that's why I recently moved to Gentoo. Arch is > one of the best distros I've used, but when you use a (primarily) binary > distro, the number of choices you have is reduced. > > I don't blame the devs, though. They must make packages that appeal to a > large number of users and Arch ends up with packages with a big number of > dependencies. If you think about it, using a little bit more of disk space > isn't a big problem compared to the problem some people would have if the > default packages weren't compiled with these extra dependencies, because > they would have to compile their own packages, defeating the reason to use > a binary-based distro. > > I know, Arch has ABS, which is a great improvement compared to others > binary-based distros, but it's still not perfect. Pacman doens't look for > custom PKGBUILDs and automatically create the new packages based on them, > and I guess it won't. Pacman wasn't meant to do that. > > You can make scripts based on pacman and ABS that will do this (I've made > one shortly before changing distros), but then I realised I don't know all > the ./configure options a package has, and I find documentation on this a > little scarce. Using the 'USE' flags with emerge is much simpler in this > aspect. > Well yeah, if you are a dependency freak, the USE flag system address exactly that and is probably the main (and only?) reason to use Gentoo. But then I realized it did not hurt anything on my system usage to have smbclient support even though I don't need it. Maybe some day I will need that feature and I will be happy it's all already there. Or maybe I won't, but it does not matter :)
