Poll about package management

[Joshua Murphy]

 [ ] I am an editor of LFS or one of the related projects
 [ ] I use LFS as my primary Linux system
 [X] I use LFS on more than one PC (including virtual machines)
 [ ] I deviate a lot from LFS (not counting package updates as deviations)
 [X] I deviate a lot from BLFS (not counting package updates as deviations)

* I've hardly had the time to rebuild by hand in the past year or so
(I try to do it occasionally, as I always learn something) ... and as
such, I've stuck with Gentoo for a while, but having just lost a
harddrive, I'm deciding between LFS or Gentoo for my desktop again ...
at least one of my old spare systems will always have LFS on it, when
I can manage.

 I use the following package management technique:
 ( ) It's all in my head!
 (X) I trust the lists of files in the book
 ( ) I rebuild everything every three months or less, so there is no
 need to manage anything!
 ( ) Installation script tracing with installwatch or checkinstall
 (X) Installation script tracing with some other tool *(Portage, but
that doesn't go near my LFS boxes.)
 ( ) Timestamp-based "find" operation
 ( ) User-based
 ( ) RPM
 ( ) DPKG
 ( ) Simple binary tarballs produced with DESTDIR
 ( ) Other DESTDIR-based method of producing binary packages
 () Other

 I use the following features provided by a package manager:
 [X] Knowing where each file comes from
 [X] Clean uninstallation of a package
 [X] Removal of obsolete files when upgrading to a new version
 [ ] Ability to upgrade toolchain components (most notably, glibc) painlessly
 [ ] Ability to revert mistakes easily and quickly by installing an old
 binary package
 [ ] Ability to compile once, deploy on many macines
 [ ] Scripting the build

 I will ignore the future LFS advice on package management if it
 [X] Can't be applied on a busy machine where many files are
 accessed/modified everyy minute
 [ ] Can't be used to transfer packages to another machine
 [ ] Interferes with config.site files described in DIY-linux
 [ ] Will clobber configuration files wen upgrading package versions
 [ ] Doesn't explain how to package software beyond BLFS
 [ ] Requires learning another language/syntax besides bash shell syntax
 [ ] Exists at all

* Also, if it implements too-strict dependency tracking, I'm likely to
ignore it, Portage (and FreeBSD's Ports) is the only PM I've used that
didn't drive me insane

-- 
Poison [BLX]
Joshua M. Murphy