[Ilugc] Gentoo Advantages?
- From: sridharinfinity@xxxxxxxxx (Sridhar R)
- Date: Tue Jun 29 13:17:45 2004
On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 13:10:35 +0530, Raj, Mohan (Cognizant)
<rajmohan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Conditional dependencies are possible only with a ports based system.
can you explain more on this,
Basically in package management systems like RPM, DEB the dependencies
are static for a package. Take abiworld for example. abiword has
optional gnome support (enabled through --enable-gnome configure
option, by which u can benefit with about dialog, session management
and gnome intergration). Now consider the debian package for abiword.
Would you think that package was compiled with gnome support or not?
In RPMs and Debs this is static - mean either the abiword*.deb was
compiled with gnome support or not.
But in gentoo, you can control this dependency, in this case abiword
*can* depend upon gnome or not. This is possible since the primary
way of installint a package in gentoo is by compiling it from source.
Technically this is the concept of USE flags in portage.
To install abiword with gnome support you do
$ USE='gnome' emerge abiword
or if without gnome support,
$ USE='-gnome' emerge abiword
(USE is an environment variable in the above two statements)
Portage has lot more advantages than just this.
See the gentoo docs (www.gentoo.org) for more information.
My website contains some links to gentoo resources.
--
All for the Best
Sridhar
Other related posts:
