Laying down the glove to the ricers

[Blake Barnett]

On Sep 11, 2006, at 9:58 AM, Hans Fugal wrote:

> So gentoo is for chavs, not for ricers. Fair 'nuff. In either case I'm
> glad gentoo exists. A lot of good HOWTOs and some good software (like
> keychain) have come out of gentoo or its community.

I agree completely.

The only really cool thing I've seen as part of the core Gentoo OS is  
the USE flags system and they are conversely the biggest cause of  
headaches (especially for external projects) because you'll always  
get users who think "Oh, I hate GTK!! Rip it out of everything!!!"   
And then wonder why xchat doesn't work (or one of myriad other  
scenarios).  I think most Gentoo users don't really understand that  
developers release software in a certain state, designed to be  
compiled and used in a certain, or set of certain ways.  Or maybe  
they just think they know better?  It's caused endless flamewars and  
headaches in a couple of the projects I contribute to.

All in all, if you want to learn the nitty gritty, build your own  
distro or go with LFS.  Gentoo makes great documentation,  so good  
that you can just cut-n-paste and voila!  That's not exactly  
_learning_ a whole lot.  I know a lot of people who run Gentoo (or  
other source-based distros) just for the geek-cred of doing so, even  
though most won't admit it.

-Blake