[TAG] Gentoo

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Mike Orr (mso at oz.net):

[GNOME, KDE, and Mozilla-derivs:] 

> No, it wasn't those packages.  Every six months or so there would be a 
> package that said, "This depends on package Y (VERSION), but package Y 
> (VERSION) does not appear to be available."  On the devel list you'd 
> read that package Y was held back or was waiting for the incoming 
> processor to go through the backlog.  

Sure:  On Debian-unstable.  You could still install the program in
question -- even on an -unstable system -- just not in a highly
automated version via apt-get:  Instead, you'd open your ftp or Web 
client to your favourite package archive and pull down the _prior_
package release from the same directory.  Then "dpkg -i [foo]".  Done.

People do tend to get spoiled by automation, lose perspective, and
forget that the less-automated ways still work, eh?

> This was with sid of course.  I'm sure stable doesn't have that
> problem, but stable was unusable at the time because it was two years
> out of date.

Question:  Why is it that non-Debian users who describe Debian
invariably haven't updated their calendars in five or more years?  The
"testing" branch (and the "package pools" archive reorganisation that
made it possible) -- which you persist in not discussing -- came into
existence in _2000_.  I mean, Linuxcare stock options were still
valuable, and like that.

Some systems I set up are pure Debian-unstable, since I've found over
the past eight years that the rare -unstable package bobbles have been
easy to fix, with about two exceptions that can be avoided if one is
smart enough to check either #debian or the debian-devel mailing list
archives for warnings, just before updating.

But most systems I set up and run are -testing with optional access to
-unstable packages, which is the regime I find most troublefree that
retains access to to cutting edge.  

> But I would argue that Debian makes a lot of changes that seem good to
> the developers or implement some distro-wide policy, that aren't
> necessarily any better.  Plus it makes the user think this
> distro-specific way is the normal way.

Every time I've thought that the Debian way of standardising some
package was too damned peculiar, _so far_, it's turned out that there
was a reasonable justification.  Of course, all OSes suck, nonetheless.
;->  And I'm sure there are instances of Debian recto-cranial inversion
that just aren't coming to mind.

> Testing didn't exist during much of the time I used Debian.  

Well, OK, but five years is a bloody long time by Linux standards.