On 04/11/2012 20:49, James Freer wrote:
[SNIP]
rpm is ok until it comes to updates - just seems to take forever. Yet one should be aware that more distros are rpm based than deb forked. For package management apt-debian i think is still the best (as opposed to PCLos which is apt-rpm... think they are the only ones).
I agree with you about RPMs, they are a right PITA, but not about Debian package management: so I beg to differ - based on a certain bias!
Although not ideal for all circumstances - after all, everything is source-built - but I think Gentoo's Portage is by far the best package management system out there. On servers, with no GUI, source-built is fine, and there are lots of short-cuts to be done building machines in the first instance. For a desktop, it's not so good as it can take many, many hours on a slower machine.
For desktops, there's Gentoo-based Sabayon 10, which (currently) supports Linux Kernel 3.5.4; KDE 4.9, GNOME 3.4.2, Xfce 4.10.0, and MATE 1.4.1, and is all binary-based.
It uses a tool called entropy for package management, which is based on Portage, but differs quite significantly with regard to the interface. The distro allows one to continue to use Portage, but they advise against it unless one really knows what one is doing. They strongly advise sticking to one or the other, and for desktops, I stick to Entropy and binary builds.
See: http://www.sabayon.org/release/press-release-sabayon-10 and http://wiki.sabayon.org/index.php?title=FAQ
Cheers, Laurie. --
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