Re: [9fans] Help for home user discovering Plan 9

["J.R. Mauro" <jrm8005@gmail.com>]

>>
>> The update/installation process in Ubuntu sucks. If you try something
>> using BSD ports or Gentoo portage, you can fine tune things and have
>> explicit control over the update process.
>
> I don't think so, one can acquire a complete control over any common
> Linux distribution, can opt for tuning and, tweaking around any package
> build system, provided one has the knowledge and courage to do so.

Yes and no. If you want to patch something, you have to build it on
your own, so you lose package management support. And building your
own deb package is not a great process. Plus, you have to rebuild it
whenever you update. I'm not saying you can't "completely control"
your distro, just that the package manager is inflexible and immature.
USE flags give you /real/ control over packages without forcing you to
step out of the package management infrastructure (i.e., you don't
have to install anything locally to get a patch incorporated, and you
don't sacrifice updates). You also have less namespace pollution, such
as having mutt and mutt-ng in the repository.

Emerge and ports also don't have a database that can only have one
process using it at a time, and don't take forever to update said
database.

>
> OTOH, I hate wasting cpu cycles on compiling each and every package from
> source; IMHO, building, updating and managing a FreeBSD, Gentoo and, or
> other so called source or meta distribution is merely a wastage of the
> man and machine hours.
>

I wouldn't install gentoo on an older machine, but on anything I use
day-to-day, the compilation time is a non-issue. There is no wastage
of man-hours in managing Gentoo. That is what emerge is for. There is
some wastage in CPU cycles. I never notice it (a decent machine can
emerge world, watch an HD movie, and compile a Linux kernel without
slowdown)