Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 25, 2011 11:43 UTC (Tue) by moltonel (guest, #45207)
In reply to: Maciel: Because your distro should be cool by sturmflut
Parent article: Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

> They tried to be bleeding edge and could not keep up

I do not think Gentoo's main call to fame ever was to be bleeding edge. That's certainly not the reason I keep coming back to Gentoo. The "current-ness" of packages is actually not very uniform across package types, but it's usually quite good.

Where Gentoo package choice is way ahead of other distros though, is in how easy it is to cherry-pick some package version from ~arch, masked packages, external repositories, or your own private repository. Without making a mess. To me, that more than offsets the fact that some packages may be missing or not bleeding-edge enough in the main stable repository.

Gentoo's flexibility

Posted Jan 31, 2011 13:04 UTC (Mon) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

"Where Gentoo package choice is way ahead of other distros though, is in how easy it is to cherry-pick"

Indeed this is the main reason I use it at home. As a developer it's very easy to import a random package which does the normal configure/make/make install cycle. It's also generally easy to version bump stuff up in your own overlay if the main portage tree hasn't caught up. The flexibility of Gentoo is it's main selling point.

Arguments about repository size are irrelevant next to the flexibility that provides. In fact number of installable packages is probably a poor metric for any distribution - a lot of distros carry some very esoteric packages that are useful to a handful of people but certainly not used by the majority of the distros users.