[ale] rpm.pbone.net

[Jeff Hubbs]

On 2/17/10 1:21 PM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> And if there were agreement on the best way to do all this there
> wouldn't be so many different distros.  FOSS includes "free" including
> "free" choices on how to best do things.
>    
No disagreement there.  BTW, one thing that one will see with Portage is 
its adaptability to an "imperfect" (as per RMS) software world; emerging 
certain packages does nothing but tell you how to hand-download/install 
it because the license allows use but not repackaging.  I have also for 
the first time recently seen one package block another specifically by 
virtue of its license!

> So in your setup does Gentoo for example include both lesstif and motif
> as options from a single location or does it pick one or the other and
> make you create your "overlay" for the other?   How is having to create
> "overlays" better than having to choose additional repositories in the
> RH model?
>    
Apparently there was a bit of a dust-up a couple years ago about 
lesstif; right now, it's not in Portage at all.  See 
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?format=multiple&id=193505.  
Openmotif 2.3.2 is what's current for x86 in Portage now.  If one just 
has to have lesstif right now, one is encouraged to create an overlay, 
apparently.

Suppose you were in a development shop and you had a non-OSS toolset 
that was written and maintained internally.  You could just make the 
source available and tell your folks to build it themselves or you could 
build and maintain binaries for various architectures.  But suppose it's 
got a lot of dependencies and suppose further those dependencies are 
version-twitchy.  You'd make an ebuild for your toolset just as you 
would if you were going to push it to the Gentoo repository, but instead 
you'd make the ebuild available via overlay and configure the target 
systems to use that overlay.  On the target system side, then, your 
toolset installs just like any other package and its dependencies get 
handled according to how you set it up in the ebuild.

But for normal all-OSS systems work in Gentoo, you would typically only 
make use of an overlay if you were sort of "going rogue" or taking 
advantage of the work of someone else doing the same.  I've been working 
with Gentoo for about seven years now and I've never made or used one.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Jeff
> Hubbs
> Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2010 12:32 PM
> To: ale at ale.org
> Subject: Re: [ale] rpm.pbone.net
>
> 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
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