[Pan-users] Re: FQDN and hostname

[Duncan]

Thufir <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on 
Sat, 23 Sep 2006 22:21:45 +0100:

> Gentoo itself does offer various binary workarounds to installing, from
> tarballs if memory serves, or from cd-rom, but I found it intimidating,
> with the tarballs, and my cd might've been corrupt.

Yes, Gentoo does offer what it calls GRP, the Gentoo Reference Project,
which offers precompiled packages in tar.bz2 format (with a bit of extra
package manager metadata tacked on the end).

In fact, one feature offered by portage is buildpkg, which causes portage
to archive a bin-pkg version of whatever it builds.  I have that enabled
here, and regularly use it both for backup and restore and for
troubleshooting occasional problems with new packages, since it's then
very easy to rollback to an old version, see if the problem existed there,
then back forward again if desired, without having to recompile anything
since I already have the once-compiled binpkgs.

The problem with using the GRP, however, and the reason I didn't mention
it earlier, is that it kills all the advantages of compiling from source,
including the one under discussion.  All those prebuilt packages by
definition were built with preconfigured USE flags and thus preconfigured
dependencies, so again, it's out of the user's hands -- they end up having
to take the dependency set that upstream decided was the best default for
their target user.  Additionally, and here's the /big/ problem with a user
simply choosing the all-GRP route on Gentoo, GRP releases are normally
only made in parallel to LiveCD/Installer releases, generally twice a
year, no more.  GRP PACKAGES ARE NOT UPDATED FOR SECURITY VULNS!!  That's
fine for Gentoo, as they are only supposed to be used as an installation
jump-start.  It's ASSUMED that once installation is complete, the
immediate next steps will be an emerge --sync and an emerge --update world
(naturally with a --pretend thrown in their before the live update world,
to see what's going to happen).  Thus, after installation, everything is
assumed to be updated using normal Gentoo compile from source methods. 
It's therefore a BIG mistake for someone to ONLY use the GRP, and then
wait until the next release and a new GRP to update.

The result, therefore, is that if someone's going to use GRP for anything
more than a quick installation boost, they are far better off going with a
conventional binary distribution.  Thus, unless you want to deal with
routine compiling from source, back to Fedora or whatever binary
distribution it is!

Gentoo package management is one thing, but unless you are going to do the
entire from source thing (at least after initial installation), it doesn't
get you very far.  The problem is in the nature of the choice to go
prebuilt binary, not so much in the nature of the package manager.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman