From: Sean O'Dell <sean@...>
Date: 2003-10-23T07:46:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby-oriented Linux distro?

On Wednesday 22 October 2003 03:18 pm, Ben Giddings wrote:
> Michael Garriss wrote:
> > I also have some experience with cross compiling toolchains (don't try
> > this home kids).
>
> Ugh, tell me about it.  What's worse is when you have to pass a CFLAGS
> setting every time you build something.  Most configure scripts don't know
> how to deal with a situation like this at all.
>
> Anyhow, I have experience building a linux distro from scratch.  Granted,
> it's running on an embedded processor out of 16 megs of flash, but I may
> have useful skills to contribute here for desktop builds too, and I'd like
> to do so.
>
> Is the goal to make the distro gentoo-like?  I have it at home and it is a
> pretty slick system.  I understand its portage package management system
> uses Python underneath.  I like portage, but if I were to write a package
> management system myself I'd change a lot of details.  It seems like
> portage is probably written so that it's tied to the commandline.  A more
> sensible way of doing things to me would be to have easily exchanged UIs
> for package management, text as a basic default, but GTK, QT, etc. as first
> class citizens.

Gentoo-style, all the way; you can produce a sub-distro with pre-compiled 
binaries based on it, and I have to tell you, their emerge system and the 
custom compilation flags for everything are just the best.  I love Gentoo.  
Plus, I think their way of handling packages is far simpler than just about 
anything else out there, so it would probably be the easiest to duplicate and 
offers power comparable to debian's package system.

My 2 pesos.

	Sean O'Dell