[Tfug] Gentoo Linux?

[Glenn Shannon]

Gentoo is nice, although their time-to-ports is a bit slow. (heh)

Their acceptance of contributions to their project left me somewhat a
bit miffed, so I turned to sourcemage. There, I am one of the Grimoire
maintainers, and a general question answerer for those new to the
distro. <bias>

There is no “attitude” with us, and certainly no new users that come to
use for help get anything like RTFM (maybe suggestion of reading a man
page after the answer has been given but that is as far as it gets). The
main part of this distro that I like is the complete apt-getness of the
sorcery tool. i.e. sorcery update updates the Grimoire (our version of
ports) to the latest. Sorcery upgrade upgrades all the packages, and if
necessary prompts you to recompile dependencies as needed. The
dependencies are all taken care of (via prompting) automatically, no
more hunting down this file or that (just like apt-get) just to get
package x to run.

We are quickly approaching 1.0 status (no we haven’t hit an actual
version 1 yet, but we have one of the most stable devel branches around
:) ). We have (normally) biweekly meetings to discuss status and future
plans. These are open to anyone with an irc client. For those who miss
it, we post the log of it on the webpage.
</bias>

Anyhow, good luck with gentoo. I hope it serves you well as it has me in
the past (but I have to stick with the distro I work on :) ).
Source-based distros for Linux are coming into age and I am waiting to
see what will become of it. One of the best advantages in my opinion is
that apps get into package directories quicker because of the lack of
necessity to package binaries. All we do is put the compile commands
into a script and run the script. Very simplistic, and it lets us focus
on better things like how to better emulate a source-based version of
apt-get.

Just my $0.02

Glenn

-----Original Message-----
From: tfug-admin@tfug.org [mailto:tfug-admin@tfug.org] On Behalf Of
Keith J Davey
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2002 3:35 AM
To: tfug@tfug.org
Subject: [Tfug] Gentoo Linux?

Good Day all,
 
I was just reading up on Gentoo Linux at there homepage.  From the read
I am quite interested in this upstart 
distro.  It seems to me that it may have all the servicablility of
Debian with non of the "attitude".  I come from a 
strong BSD background and this new distro may be just what I am looking
for.   I was just wondering if anyone 
has played with this distro yet, and what your expereances and opinions
are.
 
Thanks
 
Keith Davey
IBM Corp.