sean at sfsullivan
Jan 27, 2005, 7:16 AM
Post #2 of 2
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Polashek, Matthew wrote:
> Ok, so I am an old RedHat/Fedora user here, but I am looking at
> switching to gentoo to use on my PowerBook in dual boot fashion.
> (Sorry if this is redundant.) In any event, what is the deal with
> software? I noticed that the gentoo site boasts that there are over
> 8000 packages but when I look up individual packages I notice that
> they are only ready to go for certain platforms. My first impression
> was that gentoo built everything from source, but the fact that there
> are packages makes me thing differently. Can anyone comment on this?
>
>
>
> Thanks
>
They are not really packages, they are 'ebuilds' which are shell scripts
written to work with the Portage system to check for dependencies,
keywords, download the source code, and then build the app. Certain apps
are not considered stable to run on certain platforms and are keyworded
accordingly. I built my entire system using ~ppc which is software still
in the testing phase. Just plain 'ppc' would allow only packages that
are marked as stable to be installed, ~ppc for the latest that may of
may not be stable, and -ppc are hard masked apps that will most likely
break your system.
Check out this portion of the Gentoo documentation
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=3&chap=3
-Sean
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