Gentoo is a fairly well-known Linux distribution, but it is not universally adored. There’s a lot of people who seem to love it a little too much (the oft-maligned “Gentoo zealot”, who can be found in Linux forums all over the internet), and a lot of people who hate it… usually partly because of the afore-mentioned zealots as much as anything else.
So, it was kind of nice to read this in the latest Gentoo Weekly Newsletter:
The GWN-team received a story from Leann Ogasawara and other members of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), of how Gentoo is used at the laboratory. We would like to present you the full story in this week’s GWN:
“OSDL is utilizing Gentoo for various projects here at the lab. One such project is the BRT (Binary Regression Testing) project. The purpose of the BRT project is to execute suites of regression tests focused towards specific application binaries on a specific set of software packages. The goal is to make it easier for application developers to run regression tests on the latest open source software stack and to capture the results. The need to build a customizable set of software packages from the bottom up is what initially drew our interest towards Gentoo, and more specifically, the Portage package management tool. We needed a tool that would not only automate a package’s build and installation process, but also be in sync with the latest package release as well as older versions. The tool also needed to be able to track build dependencies for a package and handle their installations smoothly. The only additional functionality we would maybe like to see in Portage is the ability to automatically remove a package’s build dependencies but keep the run time dependencies installed (an ebuild DEPENDS vs RDEPENDS thing). That way our test system would only have the absolute necessary set of packages that we want installed and the extraneous packages wouldn’t have a chance to possibly interfere with our tests we want to run. Other than that, we’ve been very pleased with the Portage tool and Gentoo in general. Since we first started playing with Gentoo and researching what it could provide for us, we’ve been using it on a daily basis and it has played an integral role in the development of our project. Other developers at OSDL have also started using Gentoo in their day to day tasks and often prefer to use it as their test platform of choice.”
