Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Joshua Brindle <method@g.o>
To: Jason Cooper <gentoo@××××××××××.net>
Cc: Sven Vermeulen <swift@g.o>, gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Proposal: Social Contract change & What is "Gentoo" ?
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2004 16:32:18
Message-Id: 412B6D8E.9070707@gentoo.org
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] Proposal: Social Contract change & What is "Gentoo" ? by Jason Cooper
1 Jason Cooper wrote:
2
3 >Sven Vermeulen (swift@g.o) scribbled:
4 >
5 >
6 >>When you take a look at our current social contract
7 >>(http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/contract.xml) you will read that it talks
8 >>about "Gentoo Linux" exclusively. However, with Gentoo growing and non-Linux
9 >>ports in the make, it might be wise to change the naming from "Gentoo Linux"
10 >>to "Gentoo".
11 >>
12 >>The main question however is: "What is Gentoo"? When will we talk about
13 >>"Gentoo" and when do we talk about "a project" that "the Gentoo Project" is
14 >>working on?
15 >>
16 >>Based on the feedback I gathered from the managers meeting and from
17 >>developers, I'd like to propose something along the following lines:
18 >>
19 >>"""
20 >>We call a collection of software "Gentoo" when:
21 >>- it in total is able to boot itself (self-hosting)
22 >>- it is actively developed by the Gentoo Project
23 >>- its main software management application is a native Portage
24 >>
25 >>
26 >
27 >What about an embedded system whose image was created using embedded
28 >gentoo tools, but contains no package management? Or a minimal package
29 >management system (ipkg/apkg)? Would that fall under "Embedded Gentoo"
30 >or "Gentoo" or some customized thing?
31 >
32 >
33 >
34 This is tricky but consider, Gentoo is a metadistribution meaning it's a
35 "distribution of distributions", any distribution built with Gentoo is
36 itself also Gentoo. An embedded system built from scratch using portage
37 (even if not on the same system/arch) is Gentoo, even if the resulting
38 system doesn't need/use portage..
39
40 On the other side, using portage as a complimentary package manager to
41 build non-system applications (such as on OSX, Solaris, IRIX, etc) is
42 not Gentoo because the system wasn't resultant from a Gentoo installation.
43
44 It works, embedded is Gentoo but Portage on non-self-hosted OS's isn't,
45 as my 'definitions' are no doubt very confusing I'd like to stick with
46 what Swift has put.
47
48 Joshua Brindle
49
50 --
51 gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list