On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 01:28:42PM -0700, T8ertot dude wrote:
> Hey I'm new to the whole linux scene and I was
> wondering if I should switch from RH ES to Gentoo
> because of the package management. I have been told
> that Portage is one the best. Any thoughts
> appreciated.
If you're new to this, I'd advise against Gentoo. Gentoo packaging is
good, but all packages are compiled from source on your machine (while
you wait). Also, there is quite a learning curve to learning how to
tweak Gentoo. (Actually, I have heard there are some Gentoo variants
where the packages are precompiled and available for downloading, but I
don't know much about them.)
There's no way to avoid packaging and dependency hell completely, but
some distros do it better than others. Chuck's problem appears to be
that he's not satisfied with running the latest Evolution available for
SuSE. He wants the latest available anywhere. As Mike said, it takes
time for distributions to test and repackage versions of things for
users, so there's a lag between the latest being out, and you being able
to get a precompiled version of that latest version packaged for your
distro.
If you want to accept what the distro gives you for packages (that is,
not the latest latest latest), any major distro will probably do. By
"major distro" I mean Fedora/Red Hat, SuSE, Mandriva/Mandrake, or
Debian. (I did not include Slackware because its "packaging" is not on
the same level as the other distros; Patrick Volkerding does what he
wants to do, which often is not what others think he should do.) Fedora,
SuSE and Mandriva probably are more current than Debian, but Debian
edges them out with its package management tool (like apt-get) and its
dependency checking.
If you want to tinker, then you might as well resign yourself to some
pain along the way.
Paul
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