On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 01:14:57AM +0100, Jean-Philippe MENGUAL wrote: > Hi, > > I'd like to know how the LFS community sees Gentoo. Is it a distro > similar to LFS, but with a package manager? Is it far from the books? So > much patched? Can I have interactions between the 2 projects and help > one with another (i.e. using for example gentoo rules to suggest blfs > instructions)? > > Thanks for your answer. My purpose: having a nearly-lfs, but with sOme > work done by other, to help easily lfs and the project, but not > installing/removing everything by hand. > > Best regards, > In many ways, it is just another distro. Yes, they build most things from source (there are options for things like binary firefox, although they also have instructions for from-source), but some of their infrastructure is quite different ( the last time I looked, gcc seemed to be quite a bit older than we were using, which means it isn't (at the moment) a useful place to find patches for errors triggered by a new version of gcc, and also ISTR they prefer Python3 - obviously, with overrides to force Python2 for many desktop packages :)
For me, their USE flags are not worth learning, but YMMV. I say that as a user of my own scripts : for some packages, I do a DESTDIR build _before_ deciding what options to use, for others I just drop it into my build and (if it builds!) fix it up later for things like avoiding static libraries - in any case, ny scripts will do their best to make static libs inaccessible :) Other people care more about things like the name/location of documentation directories (/usr/share/doc/foo-x.y.z but I'll put up with /usr/share/foo or even /usr/foo until I notice it). I do find that gentoo sometimes have fixes for problems that I encounter, and I rely on them to indicate which versions of certain packages I should try (e.g. x264 for use by current ffmpeg). But overall, I think their build instructions need to be looked at package-by-package : often they have required dependencies which I don't need. Sometimes they install documentation which I hadn't considered, and which might be useful in the book. OTOH, neither of us has enough contributors. e.g. I fixed epdfview in BLFS, but they have sent its ebuild to /dev/null. So I'm sure that there are certain things we can each use from the other. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
