Re: [gentoo-project] Some focus for Gentoo

[Brian Wiborg]

Hi,

I am - except for one small ebuild some years ago - a plain Gentoo user
and not a dev at all. Still I'd like to comment on your post.

I am personally very passionate about Gentoo. Especially because of
top-3 of you blog post. Whenever people ask me why the heck I would take
the struggle of running Gentoo on my laptop and desktop I answer

    "because nowhere else I have been able to learn so much about
    Linux and have so much choice about what I want to dive into."

I work as Linux Admin for a living and am planning to do so until I
retire. I work in a business hosting company, so my clients are Linux
Admins themselves and not plain regular users or customer. If I want to
do my job well, I need to have a deeper understanding than them about
everything they could consult me about.
When I first got in contact with Linux to host a game-server for friends
about 6-ish years ago I didn't even know how to run an executable
(prefix it with ./) and had to ask. I should leave my hands off of Linux
if I don't even know how to run an executable, they said. I went from
Dapper Drake over some Ubuntu versions to Squeeze. After that I went
directly to Gentoo and have been sticky for only about three years now.
As of today, my boss believes it to be a great idea to have me in
management and so I've been promoted to lead of the hosting-team.

    Thank you Gentoo, I wouldn't have come so far without you!

I conclude that your point is absolutely valid and it would break my
heart to see this use case get out of focus.

Additionally, I would like to propose another use case:

= Felxibility =

In the age of cloud computing where rock-solid and hardened setups have
evolved to fire-and-forget throw-aways, people seem to forget that there
are still some classical environments out there. Environments of more
static nature, than disposal hosts that one just provisions on-the-fly
and destrys when done. Environments such as good old shared-hosting.
Due to the nature of portage and the ability to work in slots and mask
specific ebuild version, I know of no other distribution so perfectly
fit for such environments than Gentoo.

Ever went through a PHP upgrade with a couple thousand web-roots and
databases in a shared-hosting Debian environment? It is painful!

As a matter of fact, I know of another hosting company in my area that
builds entirely upon Gentoo while specializing in individualized
high-performance e-commerce hosting. There is no better distro for
that. Of the top of my head I would guess that is around 2-3k Gentoo
setups right there (my company and the other hoster). Consider that.

baccenfutter
o7