[olug] urpmi

[Mike Hostetler]

On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 03:46:18PM -0500, William E. Kempf wrote:
> There's an interesting package manager out there called "portage".  It's the
> package manager used by Gentoo Linux.  Sounds very interesting and is
> something I'd love to try out.  

I'd highly recommend it -- Gentoo is great on keeping up on the latest
version and it avoids rpm-hell.

But it's not for the faint of heart - the intitial install is not
automated, so you have to do everything yourself (i.e. manually fdisk and
format the drives, etc).  But the work is worth it -- the resulting
executables are fast, fast, fast . . .

I have no idea if portage has ever been ported to a non-Gentoo system,
but I really don't see why not -- it's just a series of Python scripts
with some C extensions for speed.  If someone wants to try it out, I can
send them a tarball of the sources (Not sure if you can grab it easily
off the web, since it's a part of Gentoo, they will think that you can
just get it through them).  However, it wouldn't make much sense to have
both rpm and portage both updating you system at once.  And I'm not sure
sure if there is an rpmdb-> portage conversion (though 
'rpm -q > packagelist.txt' may be a good start).


-- mikeh