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

[Grant Goodyear]

Duncan wrote: [Fri Jan 06 2006, 09:15:42AM CST]
> Tell me, from someone who obviously has some FBSD experience, what
> advantages does Gentoo/FreeBSD have over the normal FreeBSD?  Why would
> someone use it who is currently using regular FreeBSD, and why are you
> spending the time?  There are obviously reasons, as you're a very
> talented person spending quite a bit of time on the project, but equally
> obviously, I'm not familiar enough with them to make a good G/FBSD
> representative, at this point.

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.

-g2boojum-
-- 
Grant Goodyear	
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@g.o
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
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