It's a metadistribution. The entire point is to use it how you see fit
and it tries to help you do that, but it by no means holds your hand
while doing it.
I don't think "metadistribution" has an actual application here. I
see things like LFS or JeOS as metadistributions; 'being configurable'
doesn't really cut it.
I really think it has... at least from the suckless mind frame. I have
used Gentoo in the past and one of the main reasons I liked it was that
you could install only the components you liked. So if you were not
using Gnome, you could eliminate the gnome support and dependency
libraries altogether from a lot of common applications. So in a sense,
it allows you not only to decide which applications you want to install
but also have control on which subsystems you want to install. Also,
this is the very reason why it is source based as I don't think its
technically feasible to do with a binary distribution without some
standardization and/or hackery. At least, I was ready to put up with the
compilation to get rid of bloated and buggy subsystems.
I think it will be nice to have a way of directly looking up installed
components and then disabling / enabling features in binary installs
depending on their presence and absence. Also, I think having this at
the granularity of single packages is probably not a good idea and there
should be a notion of "subsystems" which applications could query. There
are many collections of packages that could become subsystems
(ssh-client, ssh-server, X-client, X-server, standard-tray-desktop...)
and that would be a nice way to give control to applications themselves
to query, enable and disable support for features in their apps.
Bottomline, I believe that giving applications more control rather than
relying on distributions to package things well would be a good first
step towards a suckless (less bloat, works out of the box) workstation /
server setup
regards,
pinocchio
