From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2007-09-11T14:20:15+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] Re: What Linux distribution to choose for learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails

On Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 11:40:29AM +0900, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Chad Perrin wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 07:00:50AM +0900, Chad Perrin wrote:
> >> On Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 05:38:32AM +0900, Lionel Bouton wrote:
> >>> Chad Perrin wrote the following on 10.09.2007 21:12 :
> >>>
> >>>> Additionally, FreeBSD provides more extensive software archives,
> >>> I'm surprised to hear this, Gentoo software coverage is huge and truly
> >>> amazing if you consider the unstable part of the Portage tree.
> >> I have yet to see any system with as much software as in Debian's
> >> software archives -- but FreeBSD comes surprisingly close.  Again, it has
> >> been a while, but last I recall Gentoo didn't have more than 15k ports.
> >> FreeBSD does.
> > 
> > I just checked.  Compared with Debian's more than 18k packages (not sure
> > how many more -- I haven't checked lately) and FreeBSD's more than 17k
> > ports, it looks like Gentoo provides just over 11k.  I think that puts
> > Gentoo solidly in second place for Linux distributions, but well behind
> > FreeBSD.
> > 
> 
> Gentoo's "unstable" doesn't really exist in the same sense that Debian
> has "stable", "testing" and "unstable". There's really three separate
> classes of packages in Gentoo ... stable, architecture-keyworded (works
> for the most part on some architectures but not truly stable on all of
> them) and packages in what are called "overlays" -- repositories where
> the really edgy stuff lives until it (sometimes) gets moved into the
> main Portage tree.

Gentoo "overlays" are a bit like Debian's "Experimental" package
repositories -- less "stable" than Unstable.  I tend to avoid anything
that hairy, though, because one of the reasons for using Unix-like
systems in the first place (for me) was greater stability than some
alternatives.


> 
> Yes, Debian has more packages. I went from Red Hat 9 to Debian ("woody")
> when Red Hat spun off Fedora. The main reason I switched from Debian to
> Gentoo about six months later was that Debian had this FSF religion
> about "the Java trap", and a lot of the software I wanted to run was
> written in Java. Gentoo had no such religion -- they had Java, most of
> the Java packages I wanted and it all worked. The other nice thing about
> Gentoo is that I've found it easier to integrate source packages that
> aren't in the tree or one of the overlays that it is to integrate the
> same package built from source into a Debian or Red Hat system.

I think I've been lucky.  I haven't needed software from outside of the
software management system of any Linux distribution (or FreeBSD, for
that matter), other than wireless drivers to use with ndiswrapper or
software run via Wine.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Isaac Asimov: "Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is
completely programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest."