OSNews

to see how people are so quick to jump to conclusions and do a lot of waving of hands and pointing of fingers.

1. I never said portage and gentoo are only bleeding edge (the fact is most people using it for a desktop distro use it in this manner -- for an embedded system you're likely to master the build once and keep it so for a very long time). 2. I never said a linux distribution sucked compared to another (I'm glad to see it - the more the merrier!). If you worked in the settop market you would know most systems (the competition) don't run Linux at all.

If you're lucky you will be running a posix compliant box and can do a little testing/coding under linux. Most times not, its single threaded, and you have to load the flash over a serial port before testing. OTOH with embedded Linux I get to load apps over NFS and kill the processes if they hang as well as all the other niceties that come with using Linux. When I'm done I master the build without NFS and other things used to speed up development.

Theres a lot of shouting about the package manager - yeah its good but move beyond that. You need more tools for the embedded market that aren't there (I've already relayed these to the embedded gentoo folks, I don't think anyone clicked), like a graphical profile manager/builder and flash allocator/burner, subprofiles for different boxes that may be deployed with different hardware, support for embedded hardware (like video outs on settops, etc. -- a lot of this stuff is not standard), '3rd party SDK' (sounds stupid but people always want it -- let people have a writable section on your flash where they can run their own scripts from), and most importantly a compact database of sorts that is stored on a writable area of flash that stores any changes that can be made to the box (i.e. IP address). That way you centralize parameters for all apps running on the box and don't have to worry about building a master all the time). Plus, you need a mechanism to upgrade the master image from a new image transferred to the writable area. Lots of these are specific to fixed markets, but a lot are not. If you want to compete with folks using other embedded or middleware solutions (commercial, linux, or whatever), just saying 'its gentoo' is not enough.

Anoncoward shouldn't throw bricks in glass houses. Its this kind of negativity that turns people away from projects.