Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

… Gentoo doesn’t need to provide a binary distro. Shipping something like Fedora, or Ubuntu, but calling it Gentoo, doesn’t really fit with the concept of a metadistribution.

There are plenty of other groups out there who are either already shipping a binary distro based on Gentoo, or who have announced their intention to do so. We should leave them to get on with what they do best, whilst we put our efforts into what we do best.

What Gentoo does need is to support these groups (and any future potential groups) by providing and demonstrating strong support for creating and installing binary packages that really work. Binary packages need to be installable without a Portage tree being present. In effect, a repository of binary packages should be treated as a Portage tree in its own right, just one without the ebuilds that we’re all familiar with. The binary package installer needs to be something that doesn’t require Python’s large disk footprint. USE-flag dependencies are needed to trap and prevent incompatible packages ending up on the same box at the same time.

The package installer is only part of the jigsaw puzzle. Binary distro groups are going to have a hard time going with Gentoo if our package tree isn’t binary-friendly. (Are? I know for a fact that at least one group is looking at moving away from Gentoo, precisely because of this problem). Developers need to think about and test their packages with binary packages in mind. To use one of the packages I work on as an example, a binary mod_php package could be for apache1 or for apache2, depending on what mod_php was compiled against. Should we be maintaining two separate packages - php-apache1 and php-apache2 - to ensure the binary packages make sense? mod_php is just one of many Apache modules in our package tree; binary packages for these too will have the self same problem.

If we’re binary-friendly, we’ll make more friends, and help make Gentoo a good choice for future distributions to base themselves off. We don’t need to be jealous of Fedora or Ubuntu’s funding, “cool” factor, or column inches. We can be happy doing what we do. And what we do best is provide the simplest way to build systems that are exactly tailored to whatever Gentoo users choose.