Re: Are we losing users to Gentoo?

[David Nusinow <krmt1984@ucla.edu>]

Hello all,
   This seems late to reply in response to this thread, but I thought
   that something is worth stating explicitly, as I didn't see it
   anywhere (I could have easily missed it, it's a long thread in a list
   full of long threads lately).

   As others have pointed out, the basic tools are there to custom-build
   packages from source. There's apt-source and apt-build, as well as
   apt-get source itself. We don't have some of the other features of
   gentoo like slots that people have brought up, but that's not an
   impossibility for the future.

   The burden and inequality, as well as the questionable benefits of
   optimized binaries has been discussed at length, and I think that
   gentoo itself shows that optimized binaries don't have to be
   distributed. If people really want them, they will use a system like
   gentoo and compile it themselves. Debian does not have to build them
   for the users.

   That said, as for a large-scale mechanism to build optimized
   binaries, if people really want it in Debian, I suggest that they
   simply put up the code for it. Take apt-source or apt-build and start
   modifying them. Take dselect, aptitude, or synaptic and provide an
   interface to apt-source or apt-build. Start testing d-i and start
   writing code that will help a user build a system from scratch if
   they really want it (help get d-i in a fully functional state first
   though!)

   So if we, the Debian community Andrew refers to, really want this,
   then "we" should implement it the same way everything else around
   here gets implemented. People do the work that they want to do. If
   people want a full ports system in Debian, get coding. Rather than
   worrying about the people who run gentoo instead of Debian (or Redhat
   or SuSE or whatever instead of Debian for that matter) worry about
   making Debian the best system that it can be, and that means writing
   code.

   - David Nusinow
     krmt1984@ucla.edu