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Mostafa Z. Afgani wrote: | Ow Mun Heng wrote: | | simply wonderful. Want a program? esearch <name>, want to install? | | emerge <name>. | | How's that any different from | | # yum info <package> | # yum install <package>
If you have never dealt with Gentoo, its difficult to explain. Mun romanticizes the simplicity. But, if you are willing to work with Gentoo, there is a world of difference.
The concept behind Gentoo is that everything is compiled as needed. In THEORY, this should leave you with all the advantages of a custom build machine, with the ease of an rpm type system. In REALITY, its not that easy.
Lets say you want to put up a website running apache and php. Lets also say you have MySQL already installed, and you wanted any program that had MySQL extensions to be compiled with MySQL support. You can configure Gentoo by placing a special keyword into a configuration file, to let emerge know that MySQL extensions should be turned on whenever a package has it available. PHP would be just such a package.
When you do an ebuild, it goes to a repository just like yum does. Only, it does not pull down an executable, but instead the source package (based upon BSD ports program). When you "emerge php", it will pull down php, and acknowledge that you configured MySQL to be compiled in, and will automatically build the php services with MySQL support. Not Postgre, MSQL, Oracle, etc, just MySQL. Again in theory, you should end up with a much more stable and targeted system. When you "emerge apache" next, it should build with the libexec module for php already in place.
There are lots of examples where this could simplify system administration. SASL could be installed and configured to be used by default. Digest-MD5 can then easily be built on top of that. SASL with Digest-MD5 authentication would then be easily available for OpenLDAP. SASL, Digest-MD5 and OpenLDAP could be automatically configured for Postfix. As you can see, many of the questions commonly asked in these newsgroups would disappear in a hurry.
If this distro worked as designed, it would put Fedora to shame. My experiences are that too many packages get into the portage tree that do not compile correctly. This causes huge problems (talk about bleeding edge!). Also, the keyword system is not well explained to newbies, so the first dozen or so builds will likely fall far short of the intended nirvana. Lastly, while all this is well and good, imagine what happens when you need to change from MySQL to Postgre for whatever reason. Or, lets say that you did not include Digest-MD5 when building OpenLDAP and Postfix. This creates a considerable amount more work than the Fedora yum or apt-get system.
I tried Gentoo in a production environment and liked it. I would have liked it much more if it came closer to its intended goals. Maybe in a few years they will get the bugs worked out, but until then, stick to Fedora especially if you are fairly new to Linux.
So, now that I have turned this short answer long, hopefully you can see that yum <package> and emerge <package> are very different. They are both used in the same way to accomplish the same goals, but do so in such a different way, that they are hardly interchangeable.
- -- Kevin Fries Network Administrator Hydrologic Consultants, Inc of Colorado (303) 969-8033 FAX: (303) 969-8357 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
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