On Friday 05 January 2007 11:56, Luke -Jr wrote:
So what's the difference between manually compiling it on Gentoo and manually building the RPM on Mandriva?
You probably don't have to manually compile it on Gentoo. Chances are it's already there and just masked.
Binary distros usually have developmental repositories for things like that as well. Mandriva's Cooker repositories are a good example.
I don't agree that more is available for Gentoo than for binary distros. If packages are available sooner, it's due to the tendency of RPM packagers to actually install them and see if they run before releasing the package.
An additional point of binary packages, in particular RPM's, is that projects like PHP will often make the binaries of their current release available directly on their site. Haven't seen any independent portage packages yet.