[Wolves] Gentoo

[C J Coleman]

On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 03:27:51PM +0100, Chris Procter wrote:
> Why? people rave abut gentoo but what is it that makes it so cool?


USE flags, mainly.  They also often support things very quickly and
(seem) more responsive to changing directions in their user base.
Gentoo really allows you to make the choices regarding your system, and
that is why it is so easy to (for example, using gentoo hardened) make
it secure or (using gaming sources) get games running well easily.  The
other thing that I find really nice is that the ebuild system is really
easy to add to and customize, as opposed to my experience in the black
art of many package systems.  The only down-side I would say is that the
progress is probably too fast for some (I am referring to the pace at
which they upgrade to new point releases), but I actually like that for
my home system.  Gentoo developers seem to prefer this to retroactive
patching, which many other people would prefer on servers.

To the people that prefer binary distros, you can do that if you want
under Gentoo.  The most common error is the image given off by a few
"elite" Gentoo users that Gentoo is all about creating some blisteringly
fast system through intense optimisations in compilation.  While you can
do that, the system offers much more.  I, myself, use quite conservative
flags for compilation and only upgrade when I desire or there is a
serious bug.  However, I am not about to try to convert people to Gentoo
- a users distro seems to be far too religious amongst many. All I would
say is that I like Gentoo, and I think it is worth a try if you have not
found what you want in other distros.  This especially goes for people
with problems with things like binary drivers, as Gentoo tends to be
more relaxed about allowing things like binary drivers into portage.
Gentoo really is the most simple I have come across in that respect (I
remember trying to get my card working under Debian, though I was doing
that largely manually so maybe I just missed the in place system).
Please note that I have never used Mandrake/Redhat/SuSe, so I do not
speak from experience with those distributions.

BTW, slightly off topic, but does anybody know the progress Debian has
made on integrating a USE flag like system into apt?  There was a lot of
talk about this on one of the Debian developers mailing lists.  I would
be interested in this, as it is the major plus Gentoo has at the moment
- and currently, has alone really (BSD ports systems have "flavors", but
it is nowhere near the USE flag in portage IMO).

That ended up longer than I planned ^_^.

-- 
C J Coleman <ug97cjc at cs dot bham dot ac dot uk>  GPG Key ID: A0F63EF1
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