Gentoo anyone?

[Joshua McKinney]

> I have a friend who tried out Gentoo, and went away extremely
> unimpressed . . . I asked him for a bit of a rant to post here, and
> he came up with this: http://gophernet.org/gentoo.html
> 
> Pleasepleaseplease don't let this get onto slashdot . . . .
> 
> > Otherwise, I'll go for Debian next I think.
> > 
> Go for Debian now. It's not perfect, but it's /good/.
> 
> Simon
> 
> -- 
> PGP public key Id 0x144A991C, or http://himi.org/stuff/himi.asc
> (crappy) Homepage: http://himi.org
> doe #237 (see http://www.lemuria.org/DeCSS) 
> My DeCSS mirror: ftp://himi.org/pub/mirrors/css/ 

As a current user of gentoo, I'd say that some of the stuff that
is mentioned in that rant is trivial to fix, or works fine for
me.  Some of the stuff in it is inaccurate as well.  He states
that python is used to build and install the packages and make
is done away with.  Python is used to run the dependancies and
call the required commands that anyone doing a compile from
source would do ie. wget source.tgz; unpack it; ./configure ...;
make; make install; ...
Some of the complaints he has with the dependancies listed for
packages have been fixed, and are a hell of a lot easier to fix
than the RPM /apt based way of doing things.

You can start from a stage 1 tarball, but it's takes quite some
time, aint we lucky that stage 3 tarballs exist for pretty much
every x86 architecture, which include prebuilt and optimised
versions of standard programs ready to install.

I switched from debian to gentoo, and won't be going back
anytime soon.  For someone with a tiny bit of clue I find that
it the best desktop version of linux available.  It's not a
distro that I'd recommend to a newbie or someone that's not used
to thinking for themselves however, but then neither is debian.

Michael, you probably should try the rc's for gentoo 1.4, as
much as upgrading gcc from 2.95 to 3.x looks like it will be
made easy, I'd prefer to just not have to change when 1.4 comes
out.

Anyway enough of me ranting :)


-- 
If I can't fix it, it aint broke.