philosophy of design; request for instruction

[Nick Wiltshire]

> It depends on what you consider "robust".  My experience is that Gentoos
> package management is a nightmare, giving you mysterious error messages
> with every update that are impossible to understand and finally leaves you
> unable to fix all the dependency problems it's running into because they
> are not fixable.  After a short while, you run into a dependency loop in
> that you need to update stuff which needs to be updated before you can
> update, and at point, you have to reinstall from scratch.
> 
> That makes every update a dreadful experience which is best be avoided.  If
> you are ok with spending lots of time trying to figure out what the error
> messages mean, whith asking for help on their mailing list and with going
> through all that at least once per week, with compile times amounting to
> many hours even with 2x6x2 cores, then you may consider Gentoos package
> management "robust" --- like in that emerge usually doesn't crash.
> 

For me robust means I install a package and it generally just works. It also 
means I get to choose what software I want.

My experience with other distros is if you want a package outside of the 
normal set of packages you end up on some website giving you instructions to 
add some mirror that contains something you want. At some point that mirror 
breaks and you end up hunting for a new one. Sure Gentoo has overlays too but 
portage has far and away the largest set of default packages. It also lets you 
choose your init system. 

For me, because I admin quite a number of Gentoo boxes I actually have a VM 
that compiles binary packages for me once a week and when I want to upgrade my 
production boxes it's just as quick as using yum or apt.

Arch has AUR which is awful. They lean on it heavily and there are many many 
broken packages. I thought I found heaven when I installed Manjaro. Rolling, 
easy set up, binary packages. But after having it on my laptop for 6 months I 
realized the package management system was utter garbage. Builds fail on a 
regular basis. God forbid your keychain gets out of date. And if you don't run 
updates constantly - good luck. Reinstall.

Yum and apt are fine for the most part. But I've had both crater a system in 
ways I couldn't explain. I have members on my dev team currently unable to run 
Vagrant because of some lib issues that just won't go away. Mine just works.

So, to each their own. I've been a Gentoo user since 1.2. I have tried many, 
many other distros (and given them a fair shake) because I keep seeing the 
green grass of not compiling my own packages. But every time I end up back 
here. Maybe it's just a matter of what you're used to.