[tlug] Gentoo Binaries?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

phillip tribble writes:

 > Is it possible to have Gentoo only install binary packages instead of
 > compiling?

Yes.  Get it at http://www.ubuntu.org/.

:-)

Seriously, if you want a binary distribution, choose a binary
distribution.  I doubt that any binary distribution based on Gentoo is
going to be anything but a convenience; it is not going to give you
the access to features that Gentoo dues through its USE flags.  Gentoo
does allow you to build a local cache of packages so that you can
restore a working state quickly, and I bet that Sayabon is basically
just http access to somebody's cache.  It might be a quick way to get
started with Gentoo, though.

It's a simple application of the no free lunch principle.  The binary-
oriented distros like Debian and Fedora and commercially-supported
distros like Ubuntu and RHEL put a huge amount of testing into
ensuring that supported configurations work.  The flip side is that
unsupported features are unsupported, and may not even be configured
in for self-protection from extraneous bug reports.

If you want a feature set that's not in any binary distribution you
know, you have three choices:

1)  Look harder.  Worth a try, depending on how much of a hurry you're
    in.

2)  Give up on some of the features for now, send mail to your chosen
    distro's package maintainers requesting them, and be thankful that
    at least you're not dependent on having 25 million users plead for
    your features like Microsoft users are.

3)  Get a configurable source distribution, and build in the features
    you want.

HTH