On Friday 06 June 2003 19:33, Shaul Karl wrote: > On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 03:49:17PM +0300, Dan Armak wrote: > > I'll refrain from writing > > about gentoo philosophy in general (which has more aspects than what I'll > > mention here), > > Can you summarize that philosophy?
This is all IMO and not an official statement from Gentoo.org :-) Anyway, the important points of that philosophy are: - Choice. All the power of choice is in the hands of the user. (That's not to say we don't have reasonable defaults in place.) Choice between packages, the options and optimizations with which any package is built, etc. This includes installing as few packages by default as possible for a base system and not starting any optional initscripts by default. - Customizability. Gentoo is a metadistribution, various projects and architecture ports can be easily built on top of it and are then generally added to the single upstream portage tree. This is enhanced by its being a from-source distro. We make no assumptions about our target users, we just try to deliver as much choice and cusomizability as we can. - Community and freedom. Gentoo is a community-based, volunteer-driven project; it will give all its developments back to the community under free licenses, and it will never depend on non-free software. It will not hide problems from its users. There is also a thriving user community, and we try to keep the distinction between users and developers small. It's a natural process for users to become developers eventually. - Speed and uptodateness. Of course, they're important in any distro :-) We try to to keep things as uptodate and optimized as possible - apart from the cflags stuff, we view things like nptl as high-priority goals. - We install packages the way their upstream projects intended them to be. We keep default configurations where possible. Fex., we wouldn't change the default look of kde or gnome, even if we wrote our own widget style. We don't enable our framebuffer boot logo by default, even though we patch our default kernel sources with that option. For this same reason we don't have or plan to have a configuration app of our own, like suse's yast. We could include an ebuild for a generic config interface whose usage isn't tied to any distribution, but we wouldn't install it by default. Well, that's about all for the major items... -- Dan Armak Matan, Israel Public GPG key: http://cvs.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
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