On Thursday 13 March 2008 20:44:58 Russell Gadd wrote:
> The real point of all this is to ask about bug fixing as regards Debian
> Etch. Taking Gnucash as an example, when I look at the progress of updates
> on Gnucash's web site, I see that each update fixed bugs in previous
> versions (naturally). However suppose I am running an older version in Etch
> and a bug comes to light. This may well have been fixed in a later version,
> but I am assuming that Etch won't have adopted that version. I presume the
> Debian philosophy is that fixing most software is not a Debian issue
> (exceptions maybe are security problems). So what are my choices?
This is one of the reasons I settled on Gentoo, since it's something Gentoo
is designed to handle (at the expense of extra complexity for everyday stuff).
Highly simplified explanation follows:
Basically, there is only one version of Gentoo, and no concept of releases
or versions of the Gentoo distribution. Individual packages are updated,
but you never need to update the distribution itself. It's a bit like your
Grandfather's Axe. The axe handed down to you is the same axe your
Grandfather used when he was a lad. You've had to replace the handle, and
your father had to replace the head, but it's the same Axe.
My first installation of Gentoo was back in 2004. It's relatively uptodate,
but I've never had to upgrade to a later version of Gentoo, but I've never
had to go through a processing of changing the entire system from "Woody
Woodbin" to "Betty Banger" (or whatever the Debian naming conventions are)
in a big upgrade hit. Upgrades are gradual on a package by package basis.
(Yearly snapshots are made available, but these are to simplify new installs.
My 2004 installation is more or less identical to the 2008.0 snapshot which
is probably due around about now)
Multiple versions of a package will be available, some of which may be
marked as unstable. I run everything as stable by default, but there's
some packages I want to use the unstable versions of. I can control this
by adding a single line to a configuration file, to tell Gentoo to use
the unstable version of this package. The rest of the system remains as
stable, but I get the advantages of being able to use bleeding edge
versions of specific packages.
For example, two lines from my package.keywords file are:
games-simulation/dangerdeep ~amd64
=media-libs/akode-2.0_rc1 ~amd64
The first says to use the unstable AMD64 version of Dangerdeep. This is
a game that doesn't actually have a stable version. When Gentoo checks to
see what needs updating, it will find the latest unstable version of
Dangerdeep and prompt me to install it.
The second line says to use the unstable version of Akode, but only for
version 2.0_rc1. This is an audio framework which I presumably needed for
some other unstable package, or to fix a bug. The clever bit here, is that
I only get the unstable version of akode for that version - as soon as
a later stable version becomes available, Gentoo will automatically switch
back to using the stable version.
Gentoo is able to do this because it compiles everything from source, so
can be more flexible in which versions of libraries can be used with
applications etc. However, this does make upgrading slow. It's not
necessarily harder, just that:
"apt-get dangerdeep" (I'm guessing at the Debian command) might take 30
seconds to download and install dangerdeep.
"emerge dangerdeep" which does the same thing is no harder to run, but
may take 30 minutes to download, compile and install.
Upgrading things like KDE can take most of a day!
Hopefully that was of interest for those not aware that there are more
flexible ways of doing package management out there. Gentoo isn't for
everyone, and many people think that the disadvantages outweigh the
advantages. Obviously I think otherwise (I've got 3 physical and a
further 8 virtual Gentoo machines running at home, plus more at work),
but don't want to turn this into a "my distro is better than yours"
slug fest, since it's a matter of personal choice and circumstances.
Gentoo is definitely not suited to those not already comfortable with
using and configuring Linux.
--
Be seeing you, http://www.glendale.org.uk
Sam. Mail/IM (Jabber): sam@???
