Aha, would you mind elaborating? That sounds like quite the issue for Pacman to break its own dependencies.
There was a bug with http/2 in a particular version of curl, which was very quickly updated in the arch repos and rolled out to users; It broke pacman’s ability to sync.
It’s one of those frustrating things that happens, and someone has to hit the bug first. It’s nice to have a “stable” and “testing” branch so that users explicitly opt-in to bleeding edge packages.
Ah okay, I was under the impression that the installation didn’t require installing from source with the new binary system – I thought it was more akin to Arch’s installation where you just select your kernel binary in Pacman, then download, and install.
This is just the base system - it’s like any other distribution’s base install except that we don’t have an official ‘installer’; Gentoo distributes tarballs that users unpack following the guidance in the handbook.
From there most packages can be installed as a binary if the USE flags line up (and it has been asked to do so), otherwise portage will compile it for you.
After unpacking the system image you can install a binary kernel, have portage compile one for you, or manage it manually (but still let portage fetch sources)
Gentoo has a great system for managing configuration changes when a package updates a file that you’ve customised.
Would you have any resources/documentation for me to look into this more?
I misworded my original post – I was referring to things like updating the kernel. I thought that maybe the kernel would be a binary, so it would not have to be recompiled like how I would assume it usually does.
It comes down to user choice. That can now be entirely binary or from source (or from source but managed by portage)
This sounds very appealing to me, but I must admit that these sorts of configurations do seem like they would be mildly daunting to juggle on a production machine.
It’s actually pretty straightforward - you nominate packages that you want to run on ~arch (testing) and add them to some config files. Portage handles the rest.