I HATE Portage

jarek · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2002 Posts: 28

Is portage just buggy or is the concept just completely broken! Having used portage gentoo for two years I believe I'm qualified to say that the problems with emerging apps are not ever going to stop. Just look in the forums. The typical question is "I can't emerge xx", the not so unusual answer is "remerge yy". Then the followup "Why do I have to remerge yy, it's allready emerged". Answer "Don't know".
Or how about the current gnome. Evolution for example. It dependes on two packages which seem to block each other. Which means that I have to break evolution (by removing one of the blockers) and emerge. For me, that means no email for many hours since that reguired xfree and so on and so on.
Portage is simply a pain in the ass. It doesn't help. It's only a stumbling block which gentoo-users are prepared to live with in order to gain access to the ebuilds, which really only means to build apps from source without doing the hard work keeping track where that particular apps want's to be installed and so on. And lets not even talk about the speed of it.

As soon as redhat installs on my hardware, I'm back on RH.

/jarek

Pythonhead · Posted: Mon Oct 06, 2003 8:16 pm Post subject: Re: I HATE Portage

PowerFactor · Posted: Mon Oct 06, 2003 9:06 pm Post subject: Re: I HATE Portage

CMI · Apprentice Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Posts: 205

I moved to Gentoo mostly beacuse of portage. I was using Mandrake (out of lazyness) and dealing with Mandrake's shiped RPMs is horrible. Its a real PoS. Portage, in my opinion, is better.

My fav package management is Open{Net?, Free?}BSDs system. Once you set up the PKG_PATH env variable (it would be nice if the installer set this up but eh) a simple, ohh... sudo pkg_add ${PKG_PATH}kdebase-3.1.tgz fetches and installs dependencies as portage does (but seems to break a LOT less).

Daganoth · Posted: Mon Oct 06, 2003 9:42 pm Post subject:

I've been using Gentoo for two years as well, and I must say, I have been impressed. The notion that portage sucks because people don't know how it works is inane. I personally never had a problem, I read the documentation. I sat down and read the 10 pages of documenation on the Gentoo sight before emerging anything.

But yes, I have had to reemerge packages for no reason to fix them, but that is more of the exception than the rule, which is far from what I found with RPM-based distros.

The problem with the blocked packages is when upgrading Evolution is different development speeds. Evolution 1.4.x became stable before Gnome 2.4.x, and required the new libbonobo and ORBit2 packages in the 2.3.x/2.4.x build. Blocking the Evolution build avoids having multiple, possibly inconsistent builds on your computer. Its a good thing, although annoying.

Nevertheless, I feel your pain. Portage has broken my computer, turns out cause I didn't know what I was doing.

Cheers,

Rich

jarek · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2002 Posts: 28

Stalione · Guru Joined: 21 Apr 2002 Posts: 335

Its so typical of human nature to be unsatisfied. :wink:

I am a big fan of portage because I like the raw control I get on whatever I do. Not to mention the level of optimization. Prior to Gentoo I was a Slackware user and I compiled every damn thing. I never really like RPM based systems or Deb based because of lack of control.
Yes its true that portage is not perfect, but if you just read the error messages a bit carefully, and rather than just blindly emerging software, pay a little more attention to whats going on, you will realize that most of the issues can be easily solved.
Also lets not forget that portage has to be the newest package management system on the block, so lets cut it some slack. I think for its age it has performed very well.

Target · Apprentice Joined: 25 Apr 2002 Posts: 200

--nodeps: The cause of, and the solution to, all of RPM's problems...

mmealman · Guru Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 348 Location: Florida

Eggs... omelet... Portage is your whisk.

Good luck with RH not breaking during an upgrade :lol:

Your best bet is Debian stable, but you'll have to get used to using software that's about a year out of date.

jarek · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2002 Posts: 28

MADcow · Posted: Tue Oct 07, 2003 8:39 pm Post subject:

it is not always the fault of portage. Gentoo developers cannot be held accountable if some project's code will not compile on a particular system. submit complaints about bad code to the developers of the project, or to bugs.gentoo.org.

MADcow · Posted: Tue Oct 07, 2003 8:40 pm Post subject:

oh yea, and RH is WAY worse about dependency problems; you ALWAYS end up having to force deps on RPM's because it "can't find /bin/bash" as well as 3000 other things. then when you force deps and the program won't run, you find out that about 2 of those deps were actually not there. just my take on it though.

sekh · n00b Joined: 20 Dec 2002 Posts: 55

Hmmm. Personally i'm a huge fan of portage. IMO it's great. If you dont like portage you dont have to use it. Portage != gentoo. If you want you can compile everything from source and install it like that, nothing preventing you from doing that afaik.

i might be wrong here, but i think when portage upgrades something it only checks the immediate dependencies. There's a -D option which i think a lot of people dont use.
From the manpage:

cylgalad · Veteran Joined: 18 Apr 2003 Posts: 1327 Location: France

Having tried in order :
- Slackware in '96 : not very fun, quite a mess, never used it since
- Mandrake since v7 : I really HATE rpms, that's the worst piece of shit ever made in the Linux world, and urpmi sucks too, almost looks like what m$ could do with a Linux distro (hmm in fact Corel Linux looks even more as a m$-ish Linux distro) :lol:

and RH is an inferior Mandrake IMHO.
- Debian testing : apt-get is far from being as good as tools we have in Gentoo

Of course portage is not perfect, nothing can be perfect in the field of package management, never ! Don't expect too high from portage and you won't be disappointed.

DMM · n00b Joined: 06 Aug 2003 Posts: 50

It would be nice if the portage manual would at least mention [B ] blocking packages and give some general advice. RIght now, I'm stuck with 2 different blocks on the Gnome upgrade, and nobody seems ot have posted much at all on how to resolve them - something to do with bonobo and the char map utility.

from update world....

professorn · Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 3:22 pm Post subject:

Myself i have only had one problem with portage but I have only used gentoo for a month or two. The problem was with lyx but was esayly solved by compile it myself.

If have'n seen this thread i recommend you to take a look: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=67849

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20485

sekh · n00b Joined: 20 Dec 2002 Posts: 55

why was this moved from portage and programming? just curious, i'd say it has a fair bit to do with portage

ectospasm · Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 4:54 pm Post subject:

sekh · n00b Joined: 20 Dec 2002 Posts: 55

ah ok then

Dont worry, i'm not complaining, i was just curious

avenj · Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 5:28 pm Post subject:

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.

avenj · Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 5:30 pm Post subject:

jarek: you keep insisting that Portage breaks your system or forces you to break your system. You have not detailed how. That's called trolling.

Try to be specific and topical without being intentionally irritating and insulting.

zenlunatic · Guru Joined: 09 Apr 2003 Posts: 312

zenlunatic · Guru Joined: 09 Apr 2003 Posts: 312

jarek · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2002 Posts: 28