On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 12:35 AM, Arne Babenhauserheide
<arne_bab@web.de> wrote:
Am Mittwoch 05 November 2008 21:38:09 schrieb Sergiu Ivanov:
> Could you please tell me what Gentoo GNU/Hurd is exactly? Is it
> something similar to Debian GNU/Hurd, with the difference that it will
> have portage, while Debian GNU/Hurd has apt?
Gentoo GNU/Hurd was/is a try at creating a Hurd System which uses the Gentoo
package manager (portage) instead of Debian.
Gentoo is source-based and extremely configurable (and it's the system I've
been using for almost 5 years, now).
I see. Thanks for information :-)
> Sorry if the questions look senseless, I'm just trying to figure out
> what could be the goal of developing Gentoo GNU/Hurd.
Gentoo folks tend to like dabbling with the more complex stuff - mainly the
current purpose is tinkering, I think, but on the long run Gentoo offers the
advantage of a very easy to maintain package repository built around
"ebuilds", which are a kind of meta-build-scripts which contain dependencies,
build instructions and similar.
And since ebuilds are very easy to maintain, it's far easier to keep a system
current with them.
Is there any advantage over Debian binary packages when using ebuilds?
Note that I have no special preferences with debs and I'm not sitting
on a Debian system. What I pursue with this question is whether a
Gentoo GNU/Hurd would be easier to maintain up-to-date with usual
Gentoo repositories and whether it would be possible to avoid
situations like we are in at the moment: some packages are broken and
a lot of stuff does not work (emacs, for example).
BTW, I once tried to build emacs from source on Hurd and the attempt
failed. I used to think that if I have the source code of a program
for Linux, not using some kernel interfaces, I could easily build it
on the Hurd, but it proved to be false...
Generally: If someone from the Gentoo community does a Gentoo GNU/Hurd, that's
great (new contributors), but if someone would ask "should I develop a Gentoo
GNU/Hurd or hack the Hurd itself", I'd currently say "hacking the Hurd seems
to be priority at the moment to get the reference (debian) distribution usable
for general desktop usage".
I see. Seems reasonable :-) Thanks for information :-)
Regards,
scolobb