Re: [gentoo-dev] Proposal: Social Contract change & What is "Gentoo" ?

[Joshua Brindle <method@gentoo.org>]

Jason Cooper wrote:

>Sven Vermeulen (swift@gentoo.org) scribbled:
>  
>
>>When you take a look at our current social contract
>>(http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/contract.xml) you will read that it talks
>>about "Gentoo Linux" exclusively. However, with Gentoo growing and non-Linux
>>ports in the make, it might be wise to change the naming from "Gentoo Linux"
>>to "Gentoo".
>>
>>The main question however is: "What is Gentoo"? When will we talk about
>>"Gentoo" and when do we talk about "a project" that "the Gentoo Project" is
>>working on?
>>
>>Based on the feedback I gathered from the managers meeting and from
>>developers, I'd like to propose something along the following lines:
>>
>>"""
>>We call a collection of software "Gentoo" when:
>>- it in total is able to boot itself (self-hosting)
>>- it is actively developed by the Gentoo Project
>>- its main software management application is a native Portage
>>    
>>
>
>What about an embedded system whose image was created using embedded
>gentoo tools, but contains no package management?  Or a minimal package
>management system (ipkg/apkg)?  Would that fall under "Embedded Gentoo" 
>or "Gentoo" or some customized thing?
>
>  
>
This is tricky but consider, Gentoo is a metadistribution meaning it's a 
"distribution of distributions", any distribution built with Gentoo is 
itself also Gentoo. An embedded system built from scratch using portage 
(even if not on the same system/arch) is Gentoo, even if the resulting 
system doesn't need/use portage..

On the other side, using portage as a complimentary package manager to 
build non-system applications (such as on OSX, Solaris, IRIX, etc) is 
not Gentoo because the system wasn't resultant from a Gentoo installation.

It works,  embedded is Gentoo but Portage on non-self-hosted OS's isn't, 
as my 'definitions' are no doubt very confusing I'd like to stick with 
what Swift has put.

Joshua Brindle

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