Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 14th May 2002 07:05 UTC
Gentoo is so far, the big Linux surprise this year. With its 1.0 release took the Linux world by storm and converted a huge number of power users and developers from the well-known Linux distros they were using, to the lightweight Gentoo Linux. While its installation process is not for the faint of heart, it pays back the user with a highly optimized system. As a result, Gentoo is dubbed the "fastest Linux distro" to date. Read on for an exclusive interview with Gentoo's project leader, Daniel Robbins where he reveals that Gentoo will be further optimized with the fastest x86 C/C++ compiler (Intel's ICC) in addition to GCC 3.1. Daniel also speaks about the future plans for Portage and the overall system in general.
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Source Mage (formerly Sorcerer) and Gentoo are both excellent.
Source Mage is easier to setup, install, maintain, and upgrade, and has auto-healing capabilities unmatched anywhere else (except Lunar, which is a Source Mage/Sorcerer fork).
But this comes at a price. There is (currently) no versioning support, which makes it difficult to have multiple versions of, say, autoconf and automake, or a library you want several versions of.
Gentoo's weakness and strengths an almost exact mirror-image of Source Mage's ... where the one is weak, the other is strong.
Gentoo upgrades are tricky and risky (as the interview indicates), and you'd better know exactly what you're doing before you upgrade a package. It is a little more complex (but worth it for the sandbox safety features and version support). It supports versions, making it easy to have multiple versions of KDE, autoconf/automake, and various libraries present as needed, and has pretty good support for precompiled binaries when needed (e.g. Blender).
Both of these projects are important ... they have different but similar visions on how to accomplish something: leverage the power of source access with the simplicity of packaging a distro, so that normal folks using GNU/Linux can have the best of both. There is plenty of opportunity for both Source Mage and Gentoo to learn from one another and cross polinate while following their own visions (Gentoo desperately needs recursive rebuild capabilities, and the ability to audit dependencies in both directions ["I depend on that" as well as "these depend on me], while Source Mage really needs a sandbox scheme to make upgrades less intrusive (e.g. not clobbering a running X while upgrading a new one) and version support in its spell system so multiple library and application versions can coexist peacefully).
Whichever distro you use (and I use both), you will find the learning curve of dealing with a source based distro to be well worth it. Indeed, you'll likely find you're unable to go back to a binary distro, no matter how well packaged, once you've had a taste of the speed and stability a source based distro like Gentoo and Source Mage can give you.