Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Shared libraries in Gentoo

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

Apparently, though unproven, at 18:13 on Tuesday 07 September 2010, Ajai 
Khattri did opine thusly:

> On Tue, 7 Sep 2010, Al wrote:
> >> When you say Gentoo, do you mean Portage? Remember Windows has a lot of
> >> limitations that WILL get in your way so dont be surprised when things
> >> break.
> > 
> > I am specially interested in Gentoo because it is not another linux
> > distribution, but an administration tool to build your own sources and
> > it's scope is wider than linux.
> 
> Which doesn't actually answer the question...

Gentoo is an idea, a community, an infrastructure. It is not code or a distro.

To build something, you do not use gentoo, you use portage.

To be accurate though, you use the EAPIs, which portage implements. And 
currently, even after a lot of hard work, the EAPIs are still in large part 
effectively defined as "whatever portage does".

So it really does come down to portage after all. Portage has a hard 
dependency on bash. portage is intimately wrapped up in the linux way of doing 
things.

So unless you are someone who likes pain and/or likes massive porting efforts, 
portage (aka gentoo) has an effective scope that is pretty much linux and not 
much else.

As evidence: the only non-linux port that went anywhere was on FreeBSD, now 
moribund for years.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com