[tanderson92]

Correct, the all-around best choice is Exherbo's package management. It is extremely similar to Gentoo (after all, many of us used to work on Gentoo), but I'd like to think it has fixed all the problems Gentoo had.

Portage is not used.

[wtallis]

There's no way that Exherbo's package repos are anywhere near as well maintained and broad as the distros that people have actually heard of. There's no silver bullet for that problem; the only solution is manpower that they don't have.

[tanderson92]

Exherbo's package repos are incredibly well-maintained. What is provided generally always works and things are kept very much up to date (KDE/gnome/chrome/firefox updates within 24 hours usually). Lack of public awareness doesn't always mean the system isn't as well maintained as a system like gentoo (which often breaks!)

The broadness of the system isn't quite as vast as many distributions but running a desktop / dev workstation I have never encountered a package not available that I needed.

[wtallis]

If you haven't encountered packages missing from their repo, then their search must be broken. In just a few minutes of searching, I found that they seem to be missing anything GIS-related, netperf, smokeping, targetcli, any daap server. That's just stuff I've been using my Linux box for in the past month, but it seems like Exherbo would make me do at least as much work as something like MacPorts!

[tanderson92]

Perhaps my needs are just different from yours. What I did say was "I have never encountered a package not available that I needed". That is not contradicted by your example. Your needs are different, that's cool. What isn't cool is claiming that the search is broken because I haven't found the need to search for those packages.

Exherbo may not be for you. It values users who are willing to be developers as well, and augment the system with the packages they need. You want others to do the work for you, that's not what Exherbo is about.

Besides, the original discussion concerned what package management system was best, not if it had tool X, Y or Z that you claim is very often needed.

[wtallis]

In reply to a comment that listed the quality of the package repos as one of three major areas of concern, you said that "the all-around best choice is Exherbo's package management" and that "I'd like to think it has fixed all the problems Gentoo had".

If you can't be honest about its shortcomings, you won't be able to convince anyone to try out your pet project. It doesn't matter how reliable and trouble-free it is at managing the core of the system if it immediately degrades to "build it yourself" anytime you want to use something that's not popular enough to make the cut for a live CD.

[tanderson92]

Perhaps I was unclear, and if that's the reason for any confusion I am sorry. I was referring to the majority of the comment which was about portage's shortcomings (though it is also true that ebuild quality is a major problem for gentoo). I specifically was comparing portage/the Gentoo package management infrastructure (NOT the package repos per se) with Exherbo's package management infrastructure (by which I mean the package manager, alternatives handling, repositories). This is what I meant by "Exherbo's package management"; that does not mean the breadth of the repositories.

I like to think my comments were honest: I admitted that the system while technically superior does not have the breadth that larger distributions do, but that for my purposes it was sufficient. You ignored that and found some packages not currently packaged in an attempt to disprove my experiences. Furthermore I admitted that the project may not be for you since you expect different things from a distribution than many of us do. What is dishonest about any of this? I have been incredibly frank.

Besides, one of the nice things about Exherbo is that it handles the nonexistence of a package rather seamlessly. You can compile it by hand, install to a tempdir, and then have the package manager merge it directly while giving you the ability to specify information about the package (metadata, dependencies, etc.). And then of course the package manager can uninstall it when you no longer want it. This makes the problem of "build it yourself" kinda moot.

I'm not going to bother responding to the "make the cut for a live CD" remark since obviously the there are far more packages than would fit on a liveCD or liveDVD.