[aklug] Re: custom distributions

There was mention of designing a distribution earlier (I think in context of
neveah-linux).

It should be mentioned that Gentoo linux was originally designed as a meta-distribution,
that is, a distribution for designing and distributing distributions. It had a good,
expandable and flexible design implementation. It was not ideal. For example, the
'distribution' (that is, the method used to distribute and update packages from your
build machine to clients) was and is less than optimal....ok, primitive and clumsy.

There have been a few forks. Some have forked for special interests such as embedded
systems. These are in the spirit of the original gentoo concepts and amply demonstrate
the flexibility of the gentoo configuration scheme. Others have forked to try and
rectify some of the problems (both technical and philosophical) but these have met with
limited success.

All that being said, I don't recommend it for designing distributions (or much of
anything else) anymore because the core design team seems to have lost their way in many
detrimental ways (too much turnover maybe?), the most irritating of which is base-system
bloat.

I continue to use gentoo because I've got a lot invested in it, and it is still usable
for what I do. In fact if push came to shove, I could easily fork it just for myself
and use and configure it only for what I need and use.

Lee
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Received on Tue Dec 4 13:47:24 2007