Debian, Arch or Gentoo 4003

Ah, you've read the "Gentoo is for Ricers" site :-). There's considerable truth to it...

Right.

I thought "Arch" was known for being a source code management system that was an alternative to CVS and such. (Arch being the one written by Tom Lord...) If there's a Linux distribution by that name, it's hardly a big name...

I started with it; the fact that it's still solely provisioned by one (alas ailing) hacker strikes me as being a *BIG* problem for, oh, call it "scalability."

There were problems for years with Slackware where it used old obsolete versions of things, and that couldn't change until Patrick Volkerding got around to it. Don Knuth got somewhat irate over the "dumb Linux people" still using TeX fonts that he had publicly requested be put down.

If only Volkerding had adopted BSD Ports as a packaging mechanism when it first arrived, that would have had several salutory effects:

1. It would allow dividing the efforts required to get new software supported across a community instead of trying to find his spare cycles;

2. It would mean he was less of a "political bottleneck" (for those deploying in commercial environs, read "Lessens risks")

3. It might have actually encouraged getting something into place that roughly corresponds to a BSD "core" (which represents kernel + tools required to compile kernel + enough to bootstrap Ports) for Linux, which would be a useful sort of understanding.

Ah, well... -- "My pid is Inigo Montoya. You kill -9 my parent process. Prepare to vi." -- Unknown