The point I was trying (so poorly) to make here was in relation to
package specific compile flags. Rather than jump straight in and emerge
a particular package and letting emerge build all the dependancies, the
dependancies dependancies etc. etc., in order to get the widely believed
benefits from Gentoo, you would first need to gather your dependancies,
determine optimal compile flags and then CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -foo -bar"
emerge <package> etc.
Of course this sounds incredibly impractical, but in order to obtain the benefits incorrectly touted by so many Gentoo users, this would need to be reality.
In reality it is not impriactical at all (at least for me). There are scripts available which, when run, examine your CPU and spit out a good set of CFLAGS. Once you have these flags you only have to set them up in the global make file (/etc/make.conf) and never have to think about them again.
Which is not to say compiling all required packages doesn't break things, but at least in my experience from using Mandrake, RedHat and a couple of other smaller distros, the overall problems I have had running Gentoo are approximatly equal to (or *less*) than other distros. After trying to do some things in Redhat (for example), which I was using first for a particular project, the distro ended up being so inflexible and difficult that simply managing the system was taking more time than building the project itself.
I don't mean to come across as negative towards Gentoo, nor it's maintainers. All distributions have their place, I just believe the benefits of Gentoo are quite often misunderstood.
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