Linked by Bob Minvielle on Wed 17th Jul 2002 19:18 UTC
There have been many articles as of late about the so called "source" distributions of Linux. Articles about "rpm hell" and how to get out of it. While I have been using Red Rat since the first release (and do have some things for and against it) there is no distribution that will please all of the people all of the time. Then again, that is what makes an OS like Linux nice, in my opinion. Choices. Today, Gentoo Linux is my choice.
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The whole fresh-off-the-programming-room-floor system seems like a good idea, until you "emerge" a new package (say Apache), you have no choice of where to install the package (I like to keep my after-install software in /usr/local) and I was actually told by a GENTOO developer (when I asked if I could do a --prefix thing with the packages) that I was wrong for wanting my program there and that I should be happy with the default, and that there was very little call for that feature so it probably wouldn't be added anytime in the near future. But also, you can't choose to install any version of the software but the very latest (including beta's which aren't ready for production use) so lets say I want to run PHP 4.1.2 and not 4.2.1 (the latest) with Apache 1.3.26, not 2 (the latest), I can't do it, (even though this combination of Apache/PHP is best for stability at this point). I absolutely hate these two things (no version control and no prefixing or custom flags), other then that I thought it was a good distribution.