Re:Not Quite Finmished yet (Score 1)

I've started using gentoo after being a slacker for quite a few years. Portage makes alot of sense - it was built by people with an appreciation of the BSD ports system. Yes, it does do file-based dependencies, and it will download, compile, and install those dependencies that are required. But it goes one better than that: You can turn off dependencies you don't care about. I.E. if you run KDE only, put -gnome in your USE variable. Bammo, nothing will get compiled with gnome support turned on. Ditto for KDE, mysql, etc, etc. This means you are only dl'ing and installing the dependencies *you* need, not the dependencies that the .deb maker thought most people would need. Gentoo can be done over a slow connection (I've got 128k idsl) and a slower machine (PII 266), but it will take a while.