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actually gentoo is a great teacher for what's happening in your linux installation...and... no there are no many equally good managers, especially for sources? none...


It's actually what you want to be.
If you want a rock solid installation you set the minimum or none optimizations for the packages.
If you want speed you set all optimizations you wish for, preying to your god not to break anything.
Ofcourse you can always choose the middle ground.
Binary distros? well, you stick with what others have already chose for you...


"Just the packaging system?" oh please...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentoo_Linux

If you really want to know how your linux system runs, use slackware or LFS.

Any package management immediately adds a layer of complexity and that means less control.

Oh man, and I warned you about this. OK then, let's see some facts and figures. Prove to me that a Gentoo system prepared in a certain way is more "stable" than one using distribution X, and/or give some figures about how much faster it is. And I'd like the figures to be based on a broad range of similarly configured installations, to make for relevant statistics (as opposed to your gut feeling). Oh, and it would help if you could demonstrate exactly how the fact that you chose your own compile flags impacted on the speed and stability, more than the impact of distro-specific dependencies or the quality of the original code of all the software packages.



Dude. If you want to really learn how a Linux distro is put together, build a Linux From Scratch installation. Where you have to understand the architecture, manually compile everything (and I mean manually, not editing a flag file and issuing a couple of emerge commands), which includes inferring dependencies yourself and making decisions about the final system. You have not compiled shit until you've compiled strange stuff that doesn't even use automake, until you've compiled yourself a weird beast like the old XFree, or prepared an entire Gnome ecosystem and allowed 1.x to coexist with 2.x peacefully. 'Cause stuff like that is what separates the distro maintainer from the emerge user.

Being told what -O2 does and staring at passing screens of compilation stuff does NOT teach you Linux.



OK, what am I looking at here? Because apart from Portage I don't see anything out of the ordinary. OK, it was the first distro to go 64bit, as I'm sure there are plenty things that other distro's pioneered. They contributed stuff to the gcc, good, many contributors to other distro's do that all the time. It's portable, lovely, it's Linux, of course it's portable. The init replacement is a nice thing, not that replacing SysV init hasn't been dealt with or at least thought about by any other distro around.

I repeat: where's the special stuff? Where's the magic? Why should a developer put his time and effort into furthering Gentoo? What does a user get that's so special?

Edited 2007-07-24 09:11

Very true, and this is the danger Gentoo faces right now: its core of developers and other "do-ers" who keep the whole entity on the road, imploding.



Equally good, perhaps, but none I think as unique as Portage. If you choose Gentoo you know you're signing up to long, tedious updating processes, so it's not something one does unless one sees benefits in this approach, or simply fancies a challenge. I'd have to disagree on the "not learning anything" item though: I've learned a great deal about the inter-relation of various core and non-core programs when they don't build and I think you learn a bit by osmosis as well, if you actually just watch the compiling process some of the time (YMMV).

Sidenote: I always thought it was quite handy for the developers having all their users accustomed to compiling stuff, as they can tell the bug-reporter to tweak ebuild X or modify USE-flag Y, then rebuild and report the results. Easier than trying to replicate a tricky bug on your own system, and the reporter gets to join in the sense of accomplishment (and immediate payoff) if the fix works.



You certainly won't hear me saying either



"Fad" implies no intrinsic benefit once the novelty factor has worn off, which (as you may have guessed) I'd strongly refute. It's not for everyone's taste, but it is an utterly unique approach with its own strengths (and weaknesses) and it remains Gentoo's strongest selling-point. For my part, I find the payoff is a sense that the OS I use every day is, in some sense, lovingly crafted by my own hand (though I acknowledge the contribution made by the processor and autotools
This might be considered something of a conceit, but that's how Gentoo makes me feel and why I continue to love using it.

Edit: tag typo. [tagpo?]

Edited 2007-07-24 00:51

And the only one. And once interest in that starts vaning it brings down the whole thing.



Let's face it, Gentoo = Portage. OK, it was fun for a while, I guess it made some people get closer to their Linux and some feel more in control and placebo'ed some into feeling they get a "faster" and more "stable" install in return.

And since none of the above is particularly well anchored in reality, yeah, I'd say there's "no intrinsic benefit once the novelty has worn off".

Look, I'm not particularly trying to bash Gentoo. There are serious objections to Gentoo being fit to survive in the Linux distro world. Gentoo fans can (a) change Gentoo to improve its fighting chances, or (b) let it go. I say it again: the FOSS world is a very harsh one. It's survival of the fittest, and Gentoo got the terminal pox. People should grow up and learn to live with it, shit happens, distro's die, it's a fact of life.

I think you've said enough of those, so I won't add any more to them, but one:

Gentoo rocks.