Michael Orlitzky posted on Wed, 03 Apr 2024 12:40:26 -0400 as excerpted: > On Wed, 2024-04-03 at 16:30 +0100, Eddie Chapman wrote: >> It does involve a relatively small hack and functionality previously >> provided by xz-utils is replaced by app-arch/p7zip. > > I did the same thing with app-arch/unzip a long time ago. You caught a > lot of shit for your post, but I don't think it was out of line. > > Worst case? You spent a lot of time building a fragile solution to a > non-problem that everyone said you were crazy for wanting in the first > place. Hi, this is Gentoo, glad to have you.
Gentoo as "meta-distro": Yes. I suspect many, perhaps most, Gentooers (individually or at the company level for corporate deployments) eventually end up doing their own thing to some degree or another. I haven't seen the term used much recently, but Gentoo can legitimately lay claim to "meta-distro", that is, a distro that makes it reasonably easy to do your own thing, creating a "mini-distro" for your own use. In fact it's reasonable to argue that (at least before the gentoo-mainstream binary packages became a thing) the relative costs of building it yourself likely ultimately lead most users who do /not/ need the meta-distro aspect to switch back to a more binary- inclined distro, perhaps arch if they still want a lot of flexibility, which means the ones that stick around on Gentoo for say a decade or longer tend to do so /because/ they ended up using that meta-distro aspect. In my own case my reverse-usrmerge ( /usr -> .) is certainly my biggest current meta-distro level divergence, tho historically, keeping USE=-semantic-desktop functionality alive locally during the period that the gentoo/kde project dropped it was an equally major divergence... but equally doable due to Gentoo's meta-distro aspect. Tho both would be rather harder were it not for git; I may not have done either one if git hadn't happened and svn was still king. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
