Last days I reinstalled my Gentoo in my desktop computer, a Dell Dimension C521 using the new package handler pkgcore.

The last months I’ve use official portage, and also new replacement called paludis. The main advantage of this one is being written entirely in C++, so paludis is very fast, but also you can detect some problems when you need to compile some “specials” packages, such qemu, which requires to be compiled with gcc3. If you compile paludis with another version of gcc, you can find a beauty error related to dynamic linking. Obviously, you can solve this problem by hand or with sonme tricks , but I don’t like tricks in production machines.

This week I finished to install my desktop computer using pkgcore. Pkgcore is another replacement of portage, written in python, but with some critical pieces in C (yes, the old reliable C), and I was surprised with the status of the development. The last time I had seen pkgcore was really unstable and very confusing for me, so I was decided to try paludis, which was more stable and mature. But, in this case, pkgcore exceeded my expectations.

In my opinion the strengths of pkgcore are:

• fast (similar to paludis, in my experience)
• easy to use (portage compatible syntax)
• portage compatible configuration
• agnostics about compiler (avoid the qemu problem)
• well colored

But nobody is perfect, so pkgcore has some disadvantages also:

• Arg! configuration file is the hell!
• Errors has special syntax, you need some practice to understand
• Very strict with no-clean packages in portage (for example when install into /lib instead to use get_lib_dir). I’m not sure if it’s a real disadvantage.

I put my pkgcore.conf file in pastebin. I hope to be usefull