Non-Problem: With Portage, wget -c is used to attempt to resume
downloads of partial files. With Paludis, this is not done by default.
Rationale: This leads to corruption and wasted bandwidth far too frequently.
In particular, if an error page that isn't recognised as a 404 is fetched from
one server (this is common for mirror://sourceforge/), resume
support means wget would then download all but the first few
hundred bytes of the file from somewhere else, leading to a corrupt distfile
notice only after lots of bandwidth has been wasted.
Paludis uses a much safer mechanism known as 'safe resume'. When downloading, the following steps are taken:
output_file.-PARTIAL- exists and is below a certain
arbitrary threshold (currently somewhere in the 100KBytes region), it is
deleted.output_file, Paludis downloads to
output_file.-PARTIAL-. If this file already exists, Paludis resumes rather than
starting from scratch.wget exits with success, output_file.-PARTIAL- is moved
to output_file.This logic is handled by the default fetcher for http://, https://
and ftp://. This can be overridden by a custom fetcher if finer grained control
is required.
Non-Problem: Paludis doesn't have an equivalent to --resume --skipfirst in Portage.
Rationale: Too unreliable, too flaky, a security hole and far too widely abused;
however, if an ebuild exits with an error, Paludis will echo a resume command
(paludis -i10 =sys-apps/foo-1.23-r1 =app-misc/fnord-2 ...) that can be used to
resume the build.
Paludis also includes --continue-on-failure support. This is much more
elegant.
Non-Problem: There's no PORTAGE_NICENESS equivalent.
Rationale: Learn how to use nice. There's no
GCC_NICENESS or VIM_NICENESS either.
Non-Problem: There's nothing like emerge --ask.
Rationale: the paludis client is non-interactive. If someone is
making an interactive client, there are much better ways of doing it than
the limited functionality that emerge --ask provides.
Non-Problem: Paludis doesn't restore the xterm title on exit.
Rationale: Neither does anything else. Some programs do set it to a guessed
value based upon a default prompt for certain distributions, but they don't
restore it. You should be using PROMPT_COMMAND to do that yourself
-- see the bash documentation.
Non-Problem: Paludis doesn't compress documentation or man pages with gzip/bzip/whatever.
Rationale: The space savings on an average system are very small, to non-existent for most filesystems. Most documentation and man pages are only about one block in size, so compression won't gain you anything except for wasted CPU cycles.