How big stable is Gentoo community 982

On Sat, 22 Apr 2006 02:09:40 -0400, Geico Caveman

all snip....

Robbins left Gentoo in 2004 I believe. Not recently. Now he had left MSFT after a little over a year there. Where he is now is anyone's guess.

I switched from Slack to Gentoo when Pat got sick. I stayed there after Gnome got dropped (even though I don't use it. I personally did not like the idea of having to import a third party set of libraries that I needed.).

The more I use Gentoo, the more I like it. It is a high maintenance distro. Installation is hardly click-and-go. Learning their portage system takes time. However, as a package building platform, I think it's excellent. I have contributed packaged to both Slack and Gentoo and the Gentoo model is very good IMHO.

While I am sure it makes hardly any difference in terms of speed, Gentoo allows for excellent flexibility in compiler command switches and processor architectures.

The user community is very stable. Most of the devs are excellent. Those without good people skills are handled by developer relations (devrel). Some packages are slow to make it to the stable branch. This is as much a QA thing as it is a manpower thing. KDE 3.5.x for example is still not marked stable since the problems with kmail, etc.

I am NOT sold on the benefits of having to compile each package by hand each time an update arrives. However, since Gentoo allows customized compiler settings at the user-level, it is impossible to provide a compatible compiled package to all users. A nice feature is that the compilation of new packages can be "nice"d so it does not interfere with ongoing work. I run a cron job each morning to see what's new, then manually review the pending changes and determine what to do.

One nifty feature is that some meta- packages, like KDE, are broken out into discreet components. For example, I use only a few KDE applications, kopete, cervisia, kjots, and a few games. Aside from arts, kdelibs and parts of kdebase, gentoo handles all the dependencies and updates only take place for the packages I use. The parts of gnome I need for packages like Evolution come in automatically too, although each library must be compiled.

The installer paradigm automatically protects files inetc, so if you're updating samba, let's say, you will not overwrite your config files. You will be asked to manually either merge the changes or on request, replace each file.

All in all, I would say give it a try, peruse the user groups, forums, and read the documentation. INSTALLATION IS A BEAR! But it does not have to be too bad since you can install most of a running system with pre-compiled packages.

From a security point of view, Gentoo stays very current. They even have a secure kernel package for hardened systems.

Feel free to email me privately if you have more specific questions. pete4abw at comcast dot net. I miss Slackware from time to time, and recently downloaded the isos for 10.2 just to see how it's doing and what has changed. The slack community is good too, and linuxpackages.net offers a lot. I know since I've contributed over 50 packages to it.

As I am sure you know, distros are a funny thing. What I like, you might hate, or vice versa. Similarly, what I think is a neat feature you could view as an impediment.

Good Luck!s Peter