[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Duncan]

Grant Goodyear posted <20060106171011.GD5051@×××××××××××××.edu>, excerpted
below,  on Fri, 06 Jan 2006 11:10:11 -0600:

> Most of the things that people like about Gentoo have little to do with
> the underlying C library, kernel, and userland.  Instead, it's portage,
> sane configuration files, and dependency-based start-up scripts that
> tend to attract people, and as such it's not surprising that people
> would like to have all of that on a nominally *BSD-based system (for
> those people who actually do care about the underlying C library,
> kernel, and userland).
>
> That's the practical reason.  A slightly more idealistic reason is that
> part of the Gentoo philosophy is that packages should work as portably
> as possible, and we should be a member-in-good-standing of the
> community.  The native *BSD teams have been known to patch their ports
> to work on their systems without sending their patches upstream.  We
> have a single portage tree that handles packages for all archs (and
> OSs), and our Alt teams work hard to generate patches that are (a)
> applied independent of arch/os/whatever and (b) sent upstream.  Consequently,
> work on non-Linux actually does a fair bit to improve the entire
> community.

Clear, short, and simple.  Thanks.

I like the "good citizen" thing, but obviously, that's hardly enough to do
it, because there are so many possible "good citizen" things out there to
do, and too little time to do them all, so there has to be another reason.

You gave one, the stuff that makes Gentoo Gentoo, independent of the
underlying kernel and userland flavor.  That stimulated me to think of
another.  Testing our packages (and the stuff from upstream) on another
base system will by definition catch bugs unseen on a single
kernel/userland, thus making both Gentoo and the upstream packages (since
we submit patches upstream)  more robust.  That's /always/ going to be a
good thing!

Thanks again.  I don't believe I would have seen that particular angle on
my own, or at least not made the connection right away.  Your explanation
made it easy!

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html


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