[plug] Slightly OT.. Gentoo users?

[William Kenworthy]

Catalyst is the new build system: normally you build your own gentoo,
but for livecd's and binary installs, they need someway to correlate and
then build all the variants.  Most distros do something similar.

Portage is just a structure and the tools to interpret and use it.  The
idea was originally pinched from BSD, but has gone its own way and is
apparently (me never having used BSD) quite superior.  There have been a
couple of so far abortive attempts to port it to other systems such as
debian, redhat etc - effectively as a smarter package management system
(and yes, portage has always been able to do binary installs, but it
gets little notice in the outside world)

Just got the "end-of-life" email from RedHat for 7.1-8.  I manage one
RH7.0 machine, how I would love to gentoo it as its stuck with a
propriety package tied to mac addresses and RH7.0 libs.  So far I have
been downloading later patched source rpm's and building them and the
inevitable dependencies by hand.  Being able to easily and simply build
just the parts of the system that need it (security) would be so nice...

BillK


On Fri, 2003-12-12 at 15:03, senectus wrote:
> Have you seen what they plan on doing with their next few versions.. 
> 
> Sounds like they're trying to improve it enough that some of the bigger
> distro's might want to add portage (or portage-ng) to their distro's..
> 
> I'm still trying to figure out what this "Catalyst" thing is they're going
> to make....