Re: [gentoo-dev] where goes Gentoo?

[Thierry Carrez]

Stuart Herbert wrote:
>>There have been some really interesting points brought up recently
>>about "where is Gentoo going?"
>
> It feels like this topic comes up every year :)

I'd say it should come up a little more often :)

>>I have been wondering that myself.
>>Some people seem to think that Gentoo has the potential to be an
>>enterprise player.
>
> Maybe, maybe not ... but I don't see why we couldn't do a little bit
> more to make it easier for others to use us as a base.
>
> Isn't that what *we're* about - being a metadistribution?

If we follow the "metadistribution" trail we should have a set of
high-level tools that really help people manage their own binary
packages building and deployment. We (all?) know that the underlying
technology is already in Gentoo, but there are still no authoritative
tool(s) to :

1- help rolling your own distribution based on Gentoo
- tool to maintain frozen Portage trees
- tool to roll out a software update pack including config files
- ...

2- help centralizing packages deployment on several workstations
- help test software update packs on gold systems
- push packages to multiple systems
- do accountability on what's installed on systems
- ...

I'm not talking about releasing an "Enterprise-oriented" flavor of
Gentoo, I'm just talking about enabling people to do so and the minimal
deployment tools needed in a 5+ machine network.

The size of the Portage tree gives us a definitive advantage : you can
have 100% Portage-packages systems, so what's-in-this-box accountability
is not the nightmare it can be with other systems that heavily rely on
third-party RPMs. We should exploit that advantage.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (Koon)
-- 
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