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avenj
Retired Dev
Joined: 11 Oct 2002
Posts: 495
Location: New Hampshire
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 Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 8:49 pm Post subject: |
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Okay, so tell the GNOME people not to make major library changes.
How would _you_ prefer we deal with something like a major library shift? I hate to break it to you, but you're not going to find a magic solution with any other distribution. It's an upstream software issue. |
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jarek
n00b
Joined: 28 Sep 2002
Posts: 28
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| Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 9:25 pm Post subject: Re: I HATE Portage |
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| zenlunatic wrote: |
First off (this is off topic really) why are using Evolution? GUI apps should never be used exclusively for critcal applications, especially running
--cut--
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I acutally hate evolution. I'm a unix user from the days of BSD V7 and grew up with news over uucp, ed and "mail". My system has users though, that use evolution and I love to show them the beauty of unix and linux. When they can't use their apps for hours when they need it, I look bad and Linux looks bad. I hate that.
| zenlunatic wrote: |
Also, your complaints are somewhat valid, but you do have to understand that Gentoo developers aren't paid and neither is drobbins. drobbins could have sold portage to the highest bidder when he made it, but he released it as free GPL'd software, which was very ethical and kind of him. I respect him because of this. IMO to many people try to flame drobbins (no not you really) without realizing this. Shit, we got people like ESR sayin "oh well look at all this great software we can run on linux like Staroffice and Oracle (not free software)" and yet people try to say Gentoo is commercial. Debian has pretty much the same packages, but listed non-free. Whooptie!
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I think drobbins has done a marvelous job as an idividual. I hope my comments will not be interpreted as critique of him or his work. Though, If this forum is a church, where is the place where we talk openly.
| zenlunatic wrote: |
Gentoo developers don't owe any of us anything. If the system sucks it's just as much all of our faults for not filing bugs etc... as mentioned. I'm very glad that Gentoo exists. Sure portage isn't perfect; no software is perfect. Is it new? Well sure we have BSD ports and stuff like sourcemage, but Portage is pretty damn unique in many respects. If you dislike something about it you have the freedoms granted under the GPL, so use them. If you have constructive critisim that express it. The truth is that no matter what OS, hardware, or environment your in you're always going to have problems, because that's just how computers are. At least you can help your neighbor using Gentoo, although it's not perfect. |
Reading some of the comments on my initial posting I see hints that I'm not the only person who thinks portage has room for improvement, but, if we don't talk about the problems, they will surelly stay with us, at least to teach us that computers never really work.
/jarek
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avenj
Retired Dev
Joined: 11 Oct 2002
Posts: 495
Location: New Hampshire
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| Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 9:42 pm Post subject: |
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| The problem is that you're not talking about the problems in specifics or offering any helpful suggestions. So far the only problem you've detailed is that sometimes upstream software causes annoying problems. There's really nothing we can do about that. |
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jarek
n00b
Joined: 28 Sep 2002
Posts: 28
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| Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 10:03 pm Post subject: |
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| avenj wrote: | Blocks are because upstream authors change something that causes incompatibilities and we, the distribution, gets stuck with finding a way to work around it for an upgrade. Blockers are a much cleaner and generally better way to deal with it than what you're stuck with when using RPMs. It's not something unique to Portage, it's just how we've chosen to deal with it - and anyone with extensive RPM experience can tell you that it's not nearly as much of a pain in the ass.
Unmerge the blocker, run the emerge you were trying to run in the first place, and you should be good. That's the point. |
Doesn't portage knonw which apps depend on which libraries (without having to look them up one by one with ldd or something). Why can't it save of copy of those libraries which will be removed when the blocker is unmerged in a temporary place, unmerge the blocker and offer (after re-login) access to those libraries via LD_LIBRARY_PATH during the rebuild? It the new library is incompatible with the installed apps, save the apps as well and offer them from a temporary bin untill all is rebuilt. Why can't it do that?
/jarek |
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avenj
Retired Dev
Joined: 11 Oct 2002
Posts: 495
Location: New Hampshire
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| Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 10:17 pm Post subject: |
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| jarek wrote: | | avenj wrote: | Blocks are because upstream authors change something that causes incompatibilities and we, the distribution, gets stuck with finding a way to work around it for an upgrade. Blockers are a much cleaner and generally better way to deal with it than what you're stuck with when using RPMs. It's not something unique to Portage, it's just how we've chosen to deal with it - and anyone with extensive RPM experience can tell you that it's not nearly as much of a pain in the ass.
Unmerge the blocker, run the emerge you were trying to run in the first place, and you should be good. That's the point. |
Doesn't portage knonw which apps depend on which libraries (without having to look them up one by one with ldd or something). Why can't it save of copy of those libraries which will be removed when the blocker is unmerged in a temporary place, unmerge the blocker and offer (after re-login) access to those libraries via LD_LIBRARY_PATH during the rebuild? It the new library is incompatible with the installed apps, save the apps as well and offer them from a temporary bin untill all is rebuilt. Why can't it do that?
/jarek |
How is it supposed to know what libraries an application links to without using ldd?
And most importantly:
Why does it need to? A library currently being accessed will not actually be removed until it's no longer being accessed. Of course, new access attempts will fail.
I guess I'm not fully familiar with the problem being discussed - something about GNOME? |
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zenlunatic
Guru
Joined: 09 Apr 2003
Posts: 312
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| Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 10:48 pm Post subject: |
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| jarek the fact that this thread hasn't become a flaming war goes to show you something about Gentoo. |
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Vann
Guru
Joined: 04 Aug 2002
Posts: 357
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| Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 11:04 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | As soon as redhat installs on my hardware, I'm back on RH. |
If using RedHat will make you less whiny I'm definitely for you switching. Flame on. |
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jarek
n00b
Joined: 28 Sep 2002
Posts: 28
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| Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 11:15 pm Post subject: |
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| avenj wrote: |
How is it supposed to know what libraries an application links to without using ldd?
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By gathering that information during the build and store in a file, perhaps?
| avenj wrote: |
And most importantly:
Why does it need to? A library currently being accessed will not actually be removed until it's no longer being accessed. Of course, new access attempts will fail.
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Excelent solution if you know their passwords and the applications they will want to start in advance. I'm aware of the unix filesystem semantics. Perhaps not so good solution otherwise.
| avenj wrote: |
I guess I'm not fully familiar with the problem being discussed - something about GNOME? |
Actually not, not specifically. The question was, if I may attempt to find the core of it, if portage allows the admin to keep the system fully available during rebuilds/emerge or not. The example (this time) was blockers. Do we have to unmerge them, break apps that depend on them or is it a bug or is it RTFM?
/jarek |
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avenj
Retired Dev
Joined: 11 Oct 2002
Posts: 495
Location: New Hampshire
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| Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 11:26 pm Post subject: |
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| You have to unmerge them. This is the same as any package management system. |
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PowerFactor
Veteran
Joined: 30 Jan 2003
Posts: 1693
Location: out of it
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| Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 11:42 pm Post subject: |
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| jarek wrote: | Actually not, not specifically. The question was, if I may attempt to find the core of it, if portage allows the admin to keep the system fully available during rebuilds/emerge or not. The example (this time) was blockers. Do we have to unmerge them, break apps that depend on them or is it a bug or is it RTFM?
/jarek |
Have you looked into using the ebuild command to compile the new packages before unmerging the blockers? Doesn't get rid or the unavailability issue altogether. But it would reduce it to a few seconds which is likeley to cause no more than a hiccup for anyone, if they notice at all. Portage doesn't really force you to do anything. But like anything, sometimes you have to give up some of the automation to really take control. |
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Vishruth
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 25 Oct 2002
Posts: 138
Location: India
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| Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2003 3:07 am Post subject: Re: I HATE Portage |
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| jarek wrote: |
As soon as redhat installs on my hardware, I'm back on RH.
/jarek |
Portage is imperfect, I understand... You want to move to another distro, I understand... but to Red Hat? If you wish to move anyway, let me suggest living with what you have right now for about two more months. Debian Sarge (the stable release) is scheduled to be released on the 1st of December. Perhaps you could get that... RedHat 7.3 was the only distro that worked nice for me (and for many other people I've seen around here).
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zenlunatic
Guru
Joined: 09 Apr 2003
Posts: 312
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| Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2003 4:12 am Post subject: Re: I HATE Portage |
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| Vm. wrote: | | jarek wrote: |
As soon as redhat installs on my hardware, I'm back on RH.
/jarek |
Portage is imperfect, I understand... You want to move to another distro, I understand... but to Red Hat? If you wish to move anyway, let me suggest living with what you have right now for about two more months. Debian Sarge (the stable release) is scheduled to be released on the 1st of December. Perhaps you could get that... RedHat 7.3 was the only distro that worked nice for me (and for many other people I've seen around here). |
Honestly. That's quite a radical jump. RPM is definitely not perfect either. |
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Azaghal
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 02 May 2003
Posts: 103
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| Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2003 3:22 pm Post subject: |
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I hardly ever have portage problems, if at all. In a harsh contrast to debian/rh... RH with it's dependancy problems, and Debian with it's broken packages (if not outdated).
And well, I only have things installed which I use. I dont use KDE or Gnome, so I don't have those huge libs installed either.
Some people seem fond to emerge just anything they think looks interresting (lets emerge gnome just in case I ever want it), and then never unmerging it.
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m00dawg
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 27 Jan 2003
Posts: 145
Location: Texas
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| Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2003 6:20 pm Post subject: Re: I HATE Portage |
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Bah, Red-Hat is crap. I spent hours trying to get Java to work on my friend's box (I was trying to introduce him to Linux and not being able to install Java didn't help). I find portage to be the easiest and coolest way of managing system softare. Not only is it decidely easy to install and uninstall but hey, you can compile form source and it WORKS.
Try doing that with Slasckware or Debian. Both are a nightmare compared to Gentoo and with Gentoo things are SO much faster. I can vouch for that too because my friend and I both had comparable machines and his was noticable slower running Red-Hat.
In a nutshell, I don't have a problem with portage at all. Although I woudln't mind if there were a better way to update configs without wiping them out and such. But other than that things are great!
Keep up the good work guys! |
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Wolfpack98
n00b
Joined: 11 Mar 2003
Posts: 61
Location: USA
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| Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2003 6:37 pm Post subject: |
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I've worked with both FreeBSD (4.7, 4.8, 5.0) RedHat Linux (6.3 and up to 9.0) and Gentoo Linux.
IMNSHO, Gentoo is the better of the choices i have listed above, mostly cause I udnerstand Linux more than I do the BSD Architecture. RedHat's RPM dependency "hell" is a big turn-off for me, even with apt-get. Granted, apt-get does save the end user some of the bigger problems of having to go through dependency checking, however, if you build source into the system (such as downloading a tarball and running ./configure) you run an even bigger risk when you upgrade.
Portage is baed off the BSD Ports system, which by itself has it's own problems. None of the package management systems out there are anywhere near perfect. Does portage suck? IMHO, No. does BSD-Ports suck? no, but it's a b*tch to keep a system upto date with portupgrade for me.
IMNSHO, the biggest issue with ANY piece of software, weither it be from Microsoft, it be from Novell, it be from SCO, IBM, GodKnowsWhoElseMakesSoftware is the fact that the end user needs to report bugs the FIRST TIME THEY SEE IT. The more bugs that hit bugzilla for gentoo, the faster it'll be caught and fixed before the next portage update happens.
I'm no developer, but I understand the process. There is never going to be a piece of software out there that's 100% stable, 100% unbreakable. Why? cause *WE* as humans built them. Human failures have the tendency of being copied into digital software code.
Just my two cents. 
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Vishruth
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 25 Oct 2002
Posts: 138
Location: India
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| Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2003 8:12 pm Post subject: Re: I HATE Portage |
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| m00dawg wrote: | | Try doing that with Slasckware or Debian. Both are a nightmare compared to Gentoo and with Gentoo things are SO much faster. I can vouch for that too because my friend and I both had comparable machines and his was noticable slower running Red-Hat. |
If getting Java to work in Debian is a nightmare, then what isn't a nightmare? I can't say anything about Slackware or RedHat though, because I've never used Slackware and I don't think I have tried to install any java environment on RedHat. To install the latest JRE I just downloaded the .bin file from the sun website and ran it as root in /usr/local and there it was... JRE installed nicely. It was fully functional with OpenOffice.org 1.3.0. I don't know if it worked with Mozilla 14 because I moved to gentoo shortly after installing JRE.
I don't entirely depend on package managers. If something doesn't work with the default package managers, I get some source packages and try to do things manually. Though with portage around, I never had to do things manually because everything just worked... except for ut2003 when I tried it a few days ago and OpenOffice1.1.0 (*sigh* too many CFlags), I installed it using the binaries available on OO.org mirrors and ut2003 with the sh script available on cd 3.
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m00dawg
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 27 Jan 2003
Posts: 145
Location: Texas
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| Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2003 10:29 pm Post subject: Re: I HATE Portage |
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| Vm. wrote: | If getting Java to work in Debian is a nightmare, then what isn't a nightmare? I can't say anything about Slackware or RedHat though, because I've never used Slackware and I don't think I have tried to install any java environment on RedHat. To install the latest JRE I just downloaded the .bin file from the sun website and ran it as root in /usr/local and there it was... JRE installed nicely. It was fully functional with OpenOffice.org 1.3.0. I don't know if it worked with Mozilla 14 because I moved to gentoo shortly after installing JRE.
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Perhaps I should have been more specific - getting Java to work *IS* easy...but getting it to work in a browser is a pain. Generally you have to do this by hand (so no, Mozilla probably did not have support for Java unless you installed the plugin yourself), and the instructions to do so don't come with the package and are kinda sketchy. After following the isntructions, the damn thing still wouldn't load any Java apps 
I really wish Sun would figure out how to make this semi-automatic. Granted, in Gentoo it is not an issue - which is part of why I think portage is awesome
As far as OpenOffice, I never had any problems emerging it, though for UT2k3 I used the included installer as well since I didn't see a reason to use Gentoo's in that case. |
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smith
Apprentice
Joined: 12 Sep 2003
Posts: 222
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| Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2003 11:03 pm Post subject: |
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Lets see.. I am sitting in front of the comp.. I decide.. "hey I would like to try.. oh lets say.. mozilla-firebird" so I start a terminal .. su in and type emerge mozilla-firebird.. then do whatever else i was doing and bam a few hours later its there.. No searching for rpms.. or source packages or all that other crap I had to do with other distros.. I will re-emerge a few apps once in a while to stay away from that crap anyday.
Portage is the only reason I suffered through the gentoo install  |
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Vishruth
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 25 Oct 2002
Posts: 138
Location: India
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| Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2003 2:06 am Post subject: Re: I HATE Portage |
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| m00dawg wrote: | | ...though for UT2k3 I used the included installer as well since I didn't see a reason to use Gentoo's in that case. |
I don't know about others but ut2003 uninstaller segfaults for me. I shouldn't have this problem if I could successfully emerge ut2003.
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krunk
Guru
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Posts: 316
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| Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2003 4:44 am Post subject: |
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I only read the first post, but speaking from the point of view of someone who was using LFS (completely source based do it yourself distro), portage is incredible. period.
Try figuring out why xx won't compile without portage and dbg |
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MCSpan20
n00b
Joined: 08 Oct 2003
Posts: 71
Location: Abilene, TX (Abilene Christian University)
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| Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2003 7:20 am Post subject: |
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| I don't know about anyone else but I have never had any problems emerging any of the 'big' progs like OpenOffice or EVOLUTION. I emerged it without Gnome too. I just type emerge evolution and bam, it's there. |
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Mystilleef
Guru
Joined: 27 Apr 2003
Posts: 561
Location: Earth
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| Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2003 5:50 pm Post subject: Yeah portage sucks, but what doesn't? |
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Clearly, we don't appreciate what we have until we've lost it. One question to you jared. How does moving to Red Hat solve the problem? Good luck on your exodus.
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Liathus
Apprentice
Joined: 21 Mar 2003
Posts: 163
Location: Fargo, ND
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| Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2003 6:11 pm Post subject: |
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| The Idea of switching back to redhat makes me sick... That being said, I think that portage could deal with the blocks a little better. In my opinion It would be great if the old package didn't get unmerged until the new one was built. That could save a lot of downtime in certain areas. |
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krunk
Guru
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Posts: 316
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| Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2003 8:37 pm Post subject: |
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| Liathus wrote: | | In my opinion It would be great if the old package didn't get unmerged until the new one was built. |
I'm pretty sure that is the way it works. Does for me as far as I've payed attention. |
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smith
Apprentice
Joined: 12 Sep 2003
Posts: 222
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| Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2003 9:58 pm Post subject: |
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| gentoo portage > * |
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