The underlying philosophy of Arch is KISS. One of the most common examples of keeping it simple is the use of the BSD init system. When it comes to packages, the policy is to keep them as vanilla as possible. That seems to help reduce a lot of the problems other distros have due to heavily modified packages - almost any problem with a package goes straight to upstream, it's really Arch's fault. So, Arch defaults to using pretty vanilla binaries, optimized for i686. There's also a build system very supposed to be very similar to Gentoo's called the Arch Build System - I haven't used Gentoo, so I'm not sure. I haven't used ABS much, but I'm pretty sure it has a system similar to the USE flags for provided default compile options for all packages. For people that want heavily modified packages, there are often other verions in the Arch User Repository.
Asa On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Josh Sled<[email protected]> wrote: > "[email protected]" <[email protected]> writes: >> Arch users and maintainers are fanatical about minimizing >> dependencies, so I've never run in to that problem in Arch. And even >> though Arch has been very stable on my desktop for over a year, I'm >> not comfortable with the idea of having a rolling release distro on a >> server, even if it is just my own home server. > > I've not used Arch or looked too deeply into it … how much does this > minimization impact features? Is it a stated policy to forgo features > in order to minimize dependencies? Or is it left more to the discretion > of individual packagers? Is there any way to control features (and thus > dependencies) as an end-user; (if you're familiar with them,) anything > similar to Gentoo's USE flags? > > -- > ...jsled > http://asynchronous.org/ - a=jsled; b=asynchronous.org; echo $...@${b} >
