[Wicher]

Coming from Gentoo, encountering Debianesque systems only later, that all-out locking really surprised me. Portage, the Gentoo package manager, only takes a lock at the very end of the installation, when a file tree (result of compilation etc) is merged into the "live" filesystem - so that those merges are serialized and checked for collisions.

[Wicher]

and of course with Gentoo, this problem needed to be solved from the start, otherwise we would've been locked out of using our package manager for a day in 2004 while we were waiting for XFree86 to finish compiling.

[deathanatos]

And Portage, if it can't get the lock, just waits for it to be free.

So whereas on Ubuntu, two competing apt commands cause one to fail, with no real recourse except a very nightmarishly long investigation resulting in the above article, in Gentoo, two competing commands … just … work.