On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 4:00 AM n952162 <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 2020-06-12 08:40, n952162 wrote: > > > >> > >> BTW, is it becoming clear why it is best to update Gentoo at least > >> ever few months? :) > > > > > > Well, yes, but it's really pretty onerous. If you have gentoo in > > embedded systems, you've got to spend considerable administrative effort > > in each one just maintaining the status quo. > > > > I mean, there's no competition to gentoo, of course. But a design goal > > could be to have a one-step sync, of some sort. > > Maybe one way to work in that direction would be to have regular - say, > yearly - "releases", kind of like other distributions do, but on an > ebuild basis, re-establishing a common base point.
Well, you already can just use a snapshot of the repository from any date in time, though things like patches might not be mirrored any longer so that isn't a perfect solution. Ultimately if there was enough interest in something like this the solution would probably be another distro that just repackages Gentoo in a release-based format. Release-based distros have their pros and cons, but they're definitely a better fit for some problems. One of the issues with Gentoo is that it is fairly niche and so you don't have the manpower to support 47 forks. With Debian you have a bazillion derivatives - half of them are just bundling a different set of default packages. Ubuntu has a Desktop and Server version of the distro, and they also have flavors for various desktop environments. Gentoo basically has just barely enough manpower to support having Gentoo. We try to accommodate as much choice as possible in how it gets used which is why this model works as well as it does. However, we can't support having a Gentoo flavor that is GPL-only, or GPL-free, or FOSS-only, or no-systemd-in-the-repo, or initial install optimized for people who read braille. You can actually tailor Gentoo towards just about any of those directions with some config file tweaks, but you can't just pick the one of 300 iso images that most closely fit your needs and run the autoinstaller and forget about it. -- Rich
