Duncan wrote: [Fri Jan 06 2006, 09:15:42AM CST] > Tell me, from someone who obviously has some FBSD experience, what > advantages does Gentoo/FreeBSD have over the normal FreeBSD? Why would > someone use it who is currently using regular FreeBSD, and why are you > spending the time? There are obviously reasons, as you're a very > talented person spending quite a bit of time on the project, but equally > obviously, I'm not familiar enough with them to make a good G/FBSD > representative, at this point.
Most of the things that people like about Gentoo have little to do with the underlying C library, kernel, and userland. Instead, it's portage, sane configuration files, and dependency-based start-up scripts that tend to attract people, and as such it's not surprising that people would like to have all of that on a nominally *BSD-based system (for those people who actually do care about the underlying C library, kernel, and userland). That's the practical reason. A slightly more idealistic reason is that part of the Gentoo philosophy is that packages should work as portably as possible, and we should be a member-in-good-standing of the community. The native *BSD teams have been known to patch their ports to work on their systems without sending their patches upstream. We have a single portage tree that handles packages for all archs (and OSs), and our Alt teams work hard to generate patches that are (a) applied independent of arch/os/whatever and (b) sent upstream. Consequently, work on non-Linux actually does a fair bit to improve the entire community. -g2boojum- -- Grant Goodyear Gentoo Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0 9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76
pgpVWVEQ7uLkQ.pgp
Description: PGP signature
