[mythtv-users] Distro roulette... (slight OT)

[Rob Hillis]

Stephen Tait wrote:

>>> Of course there's nothing preventing you from installing straight 
>>> from source via configure make make install, but of course as with 
>>> other distros this can have a bad effect with clashing packages
>>
>> That's what ebuild inject is for.  It tells Portage that "that 
>> dependancy is taken care of" when you've built your own from source.
>
> D'oh! Someone wasn't paying attention when they read the portage 
> manuals...

It's something I only discovered by accident myself... :)  That was when 
I was having serious trouble compiling the nvidia drivers against the 
2.6 kernel.

> Do other more mainstream distros support things like this? I've always 
> just rolled my own deb when I need to do anything non-standard.

Not AFAIK... but then the only distros I've looked at recently are 
Gentoo and Fedore Core 2.  Gentoo has a steep learning curve unless you 
know your way around Linux and is fiddly to get going, but damned if it 
isn't one of the most flexible ones I've run into recently.  Even 
upgrading programs to versions not in Portage is easy - and rolling your 
own ebuilds is a damned lot easier than rolling your own debs/rpms etc...