[gentoo-user] Elibc & GNU userland...

[pk]

Hi,

Yesterday I made an "emerge --sync" and was afterwards treated to this
(emerge -DupN):

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating world dependencies... done!
[ebuild   R   ] sys-libs/timezone-data-2007g  ELIBC="(glibc%*) (-FreeBSD)"
[ebuild     U ] media-libs/libmatroska-0.8.1 [0.8.0]
[ebuild     U ] sys-apps/pciutils-2.2.7-r1 [2.2.4-r3]
[ebuild   R   ] sys-apps/sed-4.1.5  USERLAND="(-GNU%*)"
[ebuild   R   ] app-arch/tar-1.18-r2  USERLAND="(GNU%*)"
[ebuild  NS   ] sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-2.6.22-r9  USE="symlink -build"
[ebuild     U ] sys-fs/device-mapper-1.02.22-r5 [1.02.19-r1]
[ebuild     U ] sys-fs/lvm2-2.02.28-r2 [2.02.10]
[ebuild   R   ] sys-apps/help2man-1.36.4  ELIBC="(glibc%*)"
[ebuild  N    ] x11-misc/read-edid-1.4.1-r1
[ebuild     U ] sys-apps/lm_sensors-2.10.4 [2.10.1]
[ebuild     U ] app-editors/emacs-22.1-r2 [22.1-r1]
[ebuild   R   ] app-portage/gentoolkit-0.2.3-r1  USERLAND="(GNU%*)"
[ebuild     U ] net-misc/ntp-4.2.4_p4 [4.2.4_p3]
[ebuild     U ] sys-libs/glibc-2.6.1 [2.5-r4]
[ebuild     U ] net-print/cups-1.2.12-r2 [1.2.12-r1]
[ebuild     U ] app-text/ghostscript-gpl-8.60-r1 [8.60]

Can someone in the know explain what this means? I googled and saw that
GNU userland is related to Gentoo/BSD. My guess would be that the Elibc
is also BSD related. I'm running a Gentoo/GNU/Linux-system... Why would
"sed" be emerged with -GNU and tar plus others be (+)GNU? From google I
could determine that it will put a "g" before each command depending
what system you run (BSD/Linux/GNU) but what else (if anything) will it
do? I could imagine that there are a few compile-time changes introduced
with +/-GNU???

I would be grateful if anyone can clarify this for me (and probably
others as well)...

Best regards

Peter K
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