Igor posted on Fri, 08 Aug 2014 17:12:27 +0400 as excerpted: > About 60% of all the packages are installed and work with nodep flag > without any problems for years. Most of the maintainers just depend on > new packages not knowing if it's necessary or not resulting in a really > HUGE update that in the absolute majority of cases destabilize GENTOO > making it not operational and WORSE than it was before. You then > STABILIZE it again spending hours and then the story repeats itself. > > Experience show that out of 20 new dependencies pulled by emerge only 1 > is critical and really needed to assemble the target. > > Is there any option in emerge to pull MINIMUM packages to get the result > - > install the application you need, leaving everything else AS IS > untouched and stable? > > I would rather prefer and many would agree to use this kind of install > instead of a full system update by default. > > Is there any USE flag that can switch system to this kind of update > instead of conventional? If no such USE flag, what about stabilize > gentoo with STABILIZED flag implementation in make.conf? > > Whoever needs everything new - can continue fighting with nature, > the rest of us who has a limited life span - well, they might go for > STABILIZED flag and live happily ever after. > > What do you think?
The above reads to me like gentoo is an inappropriate distribution for your use. Gentoo doesn't claim to be all things to all people, and there's no shame for either gentoo or a user in a user switching to something else if gentoo simply doesn't match their needs. In general, gentoo strongly emphasizes a number of things, including: 1) Rolling updates. Install once, run for years doing frequent incremental updates. 2) Staying /relatively/ current. For many packages, Gentoo removes older versions from the tree relatively quickly, certainly compared to the distros listed below, and once it's no longer in-tree, there's zero gentoo support for it -- you're on your own. 3) Build from source. Gentoo does have rather limited binary-package support, but it remains fairly rudimentary, and the general assumption is that binary packages are locally built and distributed, not as part of the distribution. (Tho at least in the past there have been binary- package ISOs distributed, but without regular update and with Gentoo's relatively rapid update cycle they're outdated rather quickly. I really don't know if there's current binpkg ISOs available or not.) 3a) There are, however, some independent gentoo-based distros that are binary-based, at least one of which allow more or less seamless switching between gentoo's source-based ebuilds and their binary-based packages. Tho I don't know of any long-term-support distros doing this. Get outside of those norms and while gentoo may work, there's likely some other distribution that will work better. If you only want to update the minimum necessary, and in particular, if you're keeping versions that have been removed from the tree, then something with a *MUCH* slower update cadence, where people sticking to versions that work for years at a time regardless of possible updates, is far more likely to match your needs. Among the possibilities are: Red Hat (RHEL) and clones: CentOS, Scientific Linux, Oracle's Linux (forgot the name ATM). Red Hat is the gold standard, very long term commercial support, IIRC 10 years, and very good community relations as they employ many of the developers on a number of core Linux upstream projects. Oracle's Linux is commercial too, and is said to undercut RH in price, but has rather horrible community relations. CentOS and Scientific Linux more community oriented and supported, free to install and update. CentOS is now directly supported by Red Hat as a community version much like Fedora, only unlike Fedora, CentOS is a direct RHEL clone and long-term supported. Scientific Linux is an independent RHEL clone, I believe primarily developed as the platform CERN standardizes on. Debian: Stable and old-stable. 100% community distribution with an emphasis on free as in freedom. Larger than most, certainly larger than gentoo. With a rather long release cycle and stable and old-stable, the support term is extended, but I don't believe it reaches that of Red Hat. Since I strongly believe in both software freedom and in the free and open source software community, this would probably be my choice if I needed longer term version stability and support. (FWIW, Arch Linux would probably be my choice for rapid-update, rolling-update, binary- core, source-based extra packages, distro, but that's not the focus of this thread and thus not on this list or mentioned elsewhere in this post.) Ubuntu LTS editions. Quite popular, longer term commercial support available, but Ubuntu/ Canonical do sometimes have somewhat contentious community relations and go their own way on some projects, with little non-Ubuntu/Canonical uptake. I'm not sure of the support term but I think it's three years full support on the LTS editions, 7-year extended. SuSE: SLED/SLES. I don't know so much about these. The OpenSuSE community edition seems to be well received, but of course doesn't have the longer term support of the commercial editions. Corporate ownership changed a few years ago and I know little of the new owners, but they do appear to be continuing active community involvement and project support (KDE, etc). Seems to be more popular in Europe and especially Eastern Europe than in the US, tho some US retailers have standardized on it for what amounts to locked-down kiosk and register type systems with outsourced maintenance and effectively zero local store user control. Those are all binary distros. If you want from-source and are willing to do more of your own support, there's Linux From Scratch (LFS) AFAIK this is 100% community and primarily consists of a maintained set of instructions for doing your own builds from sources in the common LFS context. It's thus less automated than gentoo, comparing to gentoo much like gentoo compares to the binary distros. But since you're doing all the building yourself, simply following the LFS instructions, you get to choose what and when to update on your OWN schedule. To my knowledge, there isn't a whole lot of support, but it doesn't really need it, since it's primarily a set of build instructions. You'd be on your own in terms of updates and security tracking, presumably being able to follow the same instructions for newer versions of individual packages for awhile, but at some point, you'd either migrate beyond the LFS context as the instructions you originally followed would no longer apply, or you'd need to grab a new set of release instructions and install again, using them. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
