I’ve been using Gentoo for a few years. Switching to a source-based distro has been a pleasure. It may seem a bit overkill but even with binary distros, recompiling stuff is quite common. Recompiling software outside of the package manager is a pain which I don’t want to suffer again.

Gentoo’s package manager, portage, is quite nice to use and offers advanced features (for instance, the slots allow to have both ruby 1.8 and 1.9 installed on your system, no rvm /).

Nevertheless, portage has been less and less usable on my machine. Its dependency on python makes it break fairly often and its centralized nature made it slower over time.

That’s why I switched to paludis, an alternative package manager written in C++. Paludis devs have created Exherbo, a source based distro with paludis as its main package manager. The repositories are fully decentralized and there is no difference between users and contributors.

I’ve been building my exherbo gradually over the last few months and it’s now fully usable. The base system is really lighter than Gentoo’s, making fewer assumptions about your choices (eg it does not provide a default init system). If your system is quite customized, it’s really an interesting distro. Since everybody can provide its own repo, it’s easy to provide the needed config files. For instance, systemd has a really nice support. Basically, this distro is optimized for upstream contributions.

The community is nice but has a strong RTFM culture. So you need to make sure to research your issue thoroughly before asking for help.

Paludis is by far the most capable and flexible package manager I have used. It’s still a bit rough around the edges from time to time, but I’ve never felt limited by it.

Here are some commands, just to give you the look and feel of the everyday tasks.

Updating the system

cave resolve -c1 -Cs -km -Km world

Followed by an optional

cave fix-linkage

Updating the config files can be done with

eclectic config interactive

Sometimes I have small issues with Perl libraries not properly updated after a perl update, so

cave resolve nothing --reinstall-dependents-of perl -W ghc

Will trigger a reinstall of everything which depends on perl (hopefully the perl libraries). If there are big packages depending on perl you don’t want to reinstall (say, ghc, which takes 2 hours to build on my machine), the -W flag can help you.

Sometimes, a package’s name changes, and it can confuse the resolver (it creates a dependency cycle between the old and the new name).

For instance, libelf was recently renamed to elfutils

cave resolve nothing --reinstall-dependents-of libelf \!libelf