On Wednesday 04 February 2009 09:27:31 Christopher Walters wrote: > I will mention that the performance optimizations for Gentoo mainly lie in > the kernel configuration (the binary distributions compile just about > everything you can imagine into their kernels), and in fine tuning the USE > flags, so you you don't pull in anything you neither want nor need, thus > limiting bloat.
Gentoo is also great if you want to run it on any out-of-the-ordinary hardware, or if you have niche needs. I personally don't view Gentoo as a "distro" in the traditional sense. To me, it's a build system, an app - portage or paludis - and the devs that make cool input files for that app. Building a distro from scratch for embedded devices is a painful process if you don't have an automated build system. It's not quite a trivial exercise, but portage does make it a whole lot easier. With overlays and ebuilds I write myself, I get all the benefits of compiling from source, plus all the benefits of a sane package manager, without any of the downsides of trying to combine them. I've tried to include third party rpm repos on RHEL, it was a disaster. 4 years later I still can't make head or tail of what the heck urpmi wants me to do. But an ebuild, well that's just a simple bash include file. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
