[ale] rpm.pbone.net

[Jeff Hubbs]

On 2/17/10 9:51 AM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> Not having used Gentoo I can't really comment on its world except to say
> that I doubt it has any all encompassing repository of every possible
> OSS any more than RedHat style distributions do.
>    
That's the basic idea, actually - it's not "every possible", of course, 
but a complete repository of packages is 106GiB (pats his 
updated-twice-a-day local repository).  We don't traffic in stacks of 
CDs or DVDs and personally I don't bother with Bittorrent.  A tens-of-MB 
install cd to create an initial instance for a given architecture that 
can then be flown into various and snbdry hardware in that arch is 
plenty.  Apps for which there is no package in Portage can either be 
built from source (a fully functional build system is implicit in the 
Gentoo design) or you can fairly readily make a package yourself (in 
which case you can get it added to the repository or make an overlay for 
your own use).

There is a mechanism for augmenting the repository with "overlays" - 
sometimes people create overlays for code that's developed locally, for 
instance - and there's something called "virtual packages" where, for 
instance, you have a "virtual-jdk" package that aliases to whichever JDK 
you've got dialed up.  There's no GUI installer to absorb distro 
development team effort and whose intentions can be misunderstood 
(wasn't there an AIEE! INSTALLER NUKED MY DISK! message here not long 
ago?).

Overall, a great way to produce lean, efficient Linux systems.

- Jeff