On 10/21/2014 11:59 PM, Tom Hill wrote:
On 21/10/14 23:55, Jay Ashworth wrote:
Ok, but how does it handle providing initscripts? I gather any upstreams which used to provide them aren't anymore... It's Gentoo: "You should write your own" is the most likely answer.
Actually, not at all; although I realize that's a very common misconception. Gentoo Linux is, unfortunately, often associated with the whole "gcc -O9000 -msuperfast -fwtf" wow-look-at-me crowd. It's true that some people who use Gentoo go on and rave about how many nanoseconds they were able to shave off of their boot time, or how many obscure undocumented GCC options they managed to squeeze in without a compile error. I suppose the flexible nature of Gentoo is appealing to those who like to "look cool" and show off how they can watch the compiler do its thing. However, that's not at all what the distribution is about. Gentoo is about flexibility and choice. It's got a steepish learning curve, yes, but the documentation is very good; sadly, much of it was lost a few years ago, due to a bad mishap on the community Gentoo Wiki server, apparently without any backups. Back in the day, if I wanted to learn about Samba, I'd Google "howto linux samba" and Gentoo's Wiki would usually be among the first 3 hits. Their devs take stability very seriously; it's a rolling distro, but there is still a reasonable stabilization period for each package as new versions come out, during which any open bugs may hold up the package until they're fixed. It's all about choice. In my view, Gentoo is no better or worse than Debian, Red Hat, or Ubuntu. Different species, they all make for a better ecosystem.