Tim Wilson wrote:
> On Fri, May 10, 2002 at 09:29:23AM -0500, Ben Lutgens wrote:
> 
>>Anyway, my point is that the reason you stated above for staying with it,
>>is the very reason I left it. I don't want to have to tinker constantly. I
>>do enough of that at work to keep me satiated. When I need to use a
>>computer, I just want it to work so I can do other things.
> 
> I agree that you can spend plenty of time tweaking a Gentoo system. My
> experience, however, has been that once the system is installed it's
> been pretty tinker-free. That's probably due in part to the fact that I
> run a fairly lean system.

(I haven't set up a decent solution for me to check my mail away from 
home yet, so I've missed some of this thread, and I apologize if this 
has been mentioned before)

Here's my quick take on gentoo:
In a way, it's not really a distro but a meta-distro. It's not too easy 
to do this yet, but the support is there for creating your own 'profile' 
that dictates what sort of upgrades you want to deal with and which 
packages you want available. So, for instance, you could set up a 
profile that only grabs updates on say the third patch release after a 
major release. Or only grabs the latest update of certain things, while 
leaving others stable ('course, then you've got to start managing 
dependencies, too).
(Wow, just had a major deja vu... even about typing 'deja vu')
Anyway, it's always going to be a pain keeping up with the absolute 
latest version of everything, simply because people keep working on 
their projects. My suggestion, get to a stable place and then only 
emerge updates when you find a need. (And of course I don't do a very 
good job of following my own advice.) ;)

-carlos