FreeBSD-similar build-from-source Linux?

[Chris Brennan]

On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 10:58 AM, Alejandro Imass <ait at p2ee.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 7:31 AM, Ivan Voras <ivoras at freebsd.org> wrote:
> > On 11/10/10 13:24, O. Hartmann wrote:
> >> Hello out there,
> >>
> [...]
> >
> > I think that the general opinion is that Gentoo has the closest thing to
> > that aspect of FreeBSD. Other than that, IIRC Slackware is also
> > build-friendly.
> >
>
> Slackware is actually the most similar to FBSD IMHO
>
>
I used Slackware for years ... there thing is Vanilla. They don't do things
BSDish all that much although some practices are borrowed from BSD. But on
the other hand they don't follow most GNU Conventions either .... to them,
it's a logical order of things, in some ways that's good, but it's hard to
get used to.

Gentoo is probably the closest thing to *BSD on many aspects. Most notable
is portage. It functions just like Ports but doesn't rely on BSD Makefiles
but Gentooized BASH scripts. The fundamental principles are the same though.

In some regards you could relate Slackware's binary packages to FreeBSD's
binary package system but not nearly as well developed. Slackware packages
are almost never up to date and are oft times broke in some way. There is
also no dependency checking in Slackware. Portage at least does that for
you. IIRC Arch Documentation was flaky (or at least it was a few years ago
when I felt the need to play with it).

If your looking for a Binary Base and build your own apps on top of that,
you can check out Slackware. If you want a complete Meta-distribution where
you build everything from source then Gentoo would be your best bet. It's
very well documented and supported. It's also reasonably easy to
use/maintain. Just takes some getting used to.

Did you know...

If you play a Windows 2000 CD backwards, you hear satanic messages,
but what's worse is when you play it forward....
                                      ...it installs Windows 2000

   -- Alfred Perlstein on chat at freebsd.org
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