On Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:49:19 +0100 Heiko Baums <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Am Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:17:13 -0200 > schrieb André Ramaciotti da Silva <andre.ramaciotti@xxxxxxxxx>: > > > 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. > > I don't think that you will stay too long with Gentoo. ;-) > > It is right that you can reduce the dependencies a bit and that you > are more flexible by setting USE flags. As far as I recall the > difference between Gentoo and Arch Linux regarding the disk space is > not significant if there's a difference at all, but you will need a > lot more temporary disk space for compiling and it takes several days > to compile the whole system and every update takes much longer than > on Arch Linux. So I think "wasting" a bit disk space for dependencies > which aren't needed is better than wasting too much time for > compiling the whole system. That's why I switched from Gentoo to Arch > Linux a while ago. On Arch Linux you still have the same control over > the installed packages as you have on Gentoo. Don't overvalue the USE > flags. > > There's optdepends to reduce the dependencies a bit as long as a > dependency can be made optionally. Otherwise more comfort for the > common users is better I think. > > And pacman and ABS are good as they are. There's still the > NoUpgrade option in pacman.conf if you build a package from ABS. > > Heiko But NoUpgrade isn't really a solution, because you have to do the work manually over and over again whether you use NoUpgrade or not.
