This is just a first impression breakdown – I’ve only looked at both systems a little bit, nowhere near ready to consider on an actual replacement for old-school portage.
paludis: good interface, easy to understand options, but in action some aspects seemed a little clunky. i.e., I think the user interaction of paludis is well done, just not convinced the back end is up to the job yet.
pkgcore: horrible interface, at least for the tools I’ve tried using. Not the best documentation. But the backend has been well thought out, and though not easy to grok for a casual observer, if you find the niche commands you need it screams in comparison to other tools.
Just my thoughts; I know the pkgcore folks far better than the paludis guys, but it seems like the two projects are literally taking the opposite approach to design, one going from the interface inward (the mock first, fill in the backend as you go model), the other group aiming for a tight backend, assuming that once done they can plop front ends of your choosing on it (this observation is not endorsed, nor is it based on any conversations, imagined or otherwise – just impressions).
And in other pointless news, you may have noticed a few commits from me this week (150 or so so far). Yep, i’m working on identifying packages needing some keyword loving for sparc and amd64, but while I’m poking under the hood of the dirs I’m also cleaning up old ebuilds, fixing syntax quirks, etc. So far only one item has had to be restored from the attic (yeah, I goofed on a delete, it happens).
But now, alas, I think sleep beckons. But before I forget, if you are a gentoo foundation member, please remember voting is still going on. Not a plug for me, I think there are some really awesome candidates on the ballot that far surpass me in all aspects (just to give him his due, this is a cross-campaign plug for Renat (rl03)). Anywho, best of luck to everyone on the list, if you really do care about the direction that the foundation heads in instead of just griping on the mailing lists, this is it folks, this is your chance to vote to keep folks, or replace them, or convert them into talking llamas. The power is in your hands.
Remind me to tell you the story about the llamas sometime in irc…