Re: Are we losing users to Gentoo?
On Wed, 20 Nov 2002 11:29:37 -0500
Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> wrote:
> Glenn McGrath wrote:
> > "Instead of the developers learning to treat certain versions as
> > separate packages, the developers taught Portage how to handle and
> > maintain several versions of the same package though the use of
> > SLOTs."
> >
> > It goes on to explain further with an example, basically they have an
> > extra field to differentiate between packages with the same name.
>
> rpm does this (using the version as the extra field) and it is a real
> PITA.
>
I didnt realise that, what are its bad points... i guess it could make
dependencies a bit tricker.
> > Obviously it would be rediculous to try and formally distribute binary
> > packages with many different compile options, but we could still add
> > extra features to our source packages and leave it upto our
> > enlightened users wether they use the generic binary distributed by
> > debian or stray just a little from the path and customise the binary
> > for there situation (within the limits as dictated by the packager).
>
> Yep. It requires modifying every package eventually however. See the
> DEB_BUILD_OPTS stuff and imagine it extended;
> DEB_BUILD_OPTS=strip,no-gnome,whatever.
>
It would be nice if the build options made it into the packages metadata
somehow.
Glenn
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