Fwd: UUG Installfest Announcement

[Shane Hathaway]

Michael Halcrow wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 10:49:43PM -0600, Shane Hathaway wrote:
> 
>>Gentoo is also for people like me who want all the latest stuff to
>>work well together.  In my experience, most of the problems with
>>binary packages are due to subtle library incompatibilities.  Gentoo
>>seems to eliminate that whole class of bugs.  Thus Gentoo actually
>>saves me the time I used to spend chasing down library mismatches.
> 
> 
> I've been running Debian for years (including testing branches), and I
> don't recall the last time I had a library mismatch. If you want a
> good mix of binary packages that are fairly well tested together, that
> are fairly recent, and that get fairly up-to-date security fixes, give
> Ubuntu a whirl.

That's just what I did.  In fact, I just bought a computer for my 
brother and installed Ubuntu on it.  He has been quite happy with it. 
However, I had trouble using Ubuntu for my own work because many of the 
packages I use often are community-provided packages in various states 
of maintenance.  I longed for Gentoo, where even ebuilds that haven't 
been updated in a long time still work well.

> And don't get stupid with your package management. Do esoteric hacks
> only if you know how to use the package manager right, and you won't
> ever see a mismatched shared library.

This applies as long as you only use core packages.  Even Ubuntu warns 
users when they venture out of the collection of core packages.

Actually, I might be a misfit in the Gentoo community.  I have an AMD 64 
box, but I compile for x86 rather than amd64, so I give up a little 
speed for stability.

Shane