of course, the real reason to use gentoo is so you can leave stuff like ldap off your system without going through rpm dependency hell.
if you're using shared libraries, i don't think there is any way around dependency hell short of a) accepting whatever a distribution gives you lock, stock and barrel (and hoping that they fix bugs in a timly fashion) b) or compiling updates yourself. fortunately gentoo makes it easy to find what to compile. there's no performance benefit to compiling things yourself. but i have gotten linux 2.6 with X11 working on a thinkpad 570. all the stock binary distros of X11 include instructions that the pII on that machine doesn't recognize. (admittedly, it was a week moment.) the only payoff is, i appreciate the work russ and the guys at the labs did to make plan 9 so easy to maintain so much more. ☺ - erik
