Gentoo rocks

[Derek Neighbors]

> Source build is nice, but it's not that nice. You can do it with deb- and
> rpm-bases systems. The advantage there is that they build binary packages
> that can then be installed places that don't have the build tools. I don't
> want my firewall to have a compiler. It didn't have room for one until
> recently.

One thing that seemingly gets 'glossed' over is a system is MUCH more than merely a package and dependencies.  Its about the quality of that combination.  I have never used gentoo so I can not attest there, but I will say one thing that I like about Debian is that the stuff readily tested to play nice and is cohesive.  To me this is more than just mere dependency checking.

To toot a horn I dont very often, this is one big deal in openBSD, they are probably the 'masters' of scouring applications before they put them into their distribution and the rock solid nature of openBSD and the low counts it has on bugTraq are proof.

I have said many times and will say again, if red hat had a tool that rivaled apt-get (for ease of retrieving packages, that wouldnt make it as good as Debian as the package quality still suffers), a prime example of this is 'red carpet' (yes i know this is not red hat but rather ximian).  It allows package updating VERY easily with either debian or rpm files, but I have found that it breaks your system regularly as well. 

So not having used gentoo, I can not attest to its peformance in this area, but I will say I have seen a few reviews where they mention some things being 'broken' and needing fixing in this area (nothing major).  For a young distribution I hear nothing but raves, but when comparing to more mature products except some catch up in these types of areas.

my two cents...

-Derek