Paludis Logo Introduction General Questions
Bugs, Requests, Support How do I ...?
Overview Operation
FAQ Stricter than Portage
Clients Things Paludis Does Differently
Configuration Repository Questions
API Upgrades, Old Bugs, Migration

FAQ: General Questions

I have an Unanswered Question

If you've checked the documentation, and your question really isn't answered, you should ask it in one of these places:

You are encouraged to submit an entry for this document once your question has been answered.

Why not fix Portage?

The Portage codebase is too broken to be fixed. It is a huge mess of spaghetti procedural code with no underlying design. It relies upon weird quirks in its own behaviour all over the place, so any change is liable to cause huge breakage in seemingly unrelated areas. It is almost entirely undocumented, and the internal names are perverse and often do not reflect what the code now does.

Why C++?

Because we don't have the time or the manpower to write it in C.

But C++ is ...

No it isn't. Whoever told you that was either trolling or ignorant.

Contributing

Contributions to Paludis are welcome:

Known compiler issues

The primary supported compiler for building Paludis is GCC, version 4.1 or later. Some versions of GCC, and some compiler flags, are known to have problems (these are all GCC's fault):

Recent (version 10.1) ICC will sometimes work. 10.1.008 has correctly compiled Paludis on x86_64, but only with most compiler optimisations disabled. With -xT (and probably others) the compiler will die with an internal error or a floating point exception; even without any non-standard optimisations turned on, ICC produces code that is measurably faster than GCC.

What term should I use to mean "to install a package using Paludis"?

"Install".