Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 23rd Jul 2007 21:20 UTC, submitted by Innova
"Over the past few days, I discovered that the Gentoo Foundation's charter is in the process of being revoked by the state of New Mexico, apparently due to regular paperwork not being filed by the trustees. What this means is that the Gentoo Foundation is currently hanging for its life by a string, and at any day could cease to exist as an entity. That is the very bad news. The good news is that I was able to talk to Grant Goodyear (trustee) this morning on the phone, and I have confirmed that Grant had received my email about the revocation issue that I sent 2 days ago and that he will be resolving this critical issue in the next couple of days by filing the appropriate paperwork with the state of New Mexico, and this paperwork will also remove me as President of the Foundation."
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RE[4]: I hope things work out
by dylansmrjones on Wed 25th Jul 2007 14:16
in reply to "RE[3]: I hope things work out"
Member since:2005-10-02
Where's the magic?
Customization, baby! Gentoo is what you want it to be. It's that simple. You can make a rock-solid distribution using nothing but very stable packages, or you can live dangerously and use brand new packages - you can even write your own ebuilds if the packages you want aren't available or don't allow for the kind of customization you want. I maintain my own set of ebuilds for several gnome-packages because the official ebuilds lack options.
Of course, I'm an old LFS'er, so my view is that Gentoo is LFS on Steroids - good for daily work due to lower maintainence. You can learn quite a bit from installing and using Gentoo - it depends on how you use it and how you install it. I learned a lot from LFS and I've learned a lot from Gentoo (though most from LFS). However, most Gentoo users are using Gentoo because of the option of the infinite range of customization. And that's what Gentoo is about. No other distribution make it so easy. LFS allows for more low-level work but at the cost of easy maintainence. The binary distributions do not allow for customization though Arch Linux (or Slackware) might be good alternatives. So far I'm sticking with Gentoo though I'm keeping an eye on Arch Linux.
Member since:
2006-06-21
If you want speed you set all optimizations you wish for, preying to your god not to break anything.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentoo_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