favorite package manager

[abf]

So ...vote for your favs.

On the menu today we have everything from source to apt....choose the winner!

[bigtrouble77]

Now that i've finally experienced portage I think it's be far the best. Only thing that can make it problematic is if you have a slow computer. Fortunately all of my machines are fast athon64's with lots of memory.

[abf]

btw..my vote goes to APT. i love portage, think its great, the downside though is you gotta wait for it, and for more complex programs you gotta wait even more. i am not a waiting man.

[bigtrouble77]

The only problem that I have with apt is that the packages can be quite old at times. Portage seems to be more up-to-date.

[abf]

depends on distro really.

ubuntu works in cycles. that is, breezy came out with Firefox 1.0.7, and it will remain so, even though 1.5 has been out a while now. Daper will include 1.5.x, but breezy will never see the move from 1.0.x > 1.5.x. so that explains why somtimes the packages are not the freshest and the latest.

they do it in the name of stability though.

[seablade]

REAL MEN RUN .EXE INSTALLS ALL THE WAY!!!!!!!

All you pansy linux users think you got it tough.. Bah.

Heh now that the bad joke is out of the way, Portage is hands down my favorite, with APT coming in second. My ideal situation(And I may have to look into how to do this) would be to run APT and portage side by side interacting with one another, apt for binary things(Which there are still a few, namely things i need in 32bit form to be binary) but portage for the majority of my work. Portage is just awesome.

I do still build from source some packages, usually after I emerge it and if needed unemerge it to make sure i have all dependencies. I am starting to get into the habit of using my /opt directory much more for this, another reason to stay away from Suse now. At least if it is PREFIX=/opt I can EASILY remove it without having to worry about missing anything.

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[bsmith]

As to binary packages portage does them too. I do OOo bin files. Usually they have a -bin in the package name.

[seablade]

Yea but they dont have but so many, usually the ones that HAVE to be binary and that is about it. Means for others(Especially oddball ones like I tend to need binary for) it isnt a possiblity.

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[bigtrouble77]

One thing I've noticed about portage is that they generally have a bunch of 'testing' level packages. So you can experiment with very new versions before they are declared stable.

With apt your pretty much stuck with whatever is in the repository. I found that I was constantly searching for more repository servers to get to the more current packages... which got tedius real quick.

I also think I have so many more package options for my amd64 install with portage. Ubuntu's repository servers seem to be seriously lacking in 64bit binaries atm.

But I agree that a combination of apt and portage would be ideal. Not everyone has the time to compile every single package.

[seablade]

Actually I will rephrase what I said... I am not sure I want a combination of APT and portage, but rather the possibility to include support for dpkg'd repositories as a place to get bin packages for gentoo would be good IMO.

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[Ernest_P_Worrel]

I like the lazy persons SuSE Yast approach. Just give Yast any kind of linux package and say "here u go have fun".