On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 10:35 PM, Larry Vaden <vaden at texoma.net> wrote: > On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 9:01 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote: >> 3) As far as I know Cygwin doesn't build locally. Stuff is built >> 'somewhere else' and then cygwin-setup downloads the archives, unpacks >> them, and installs it into \cygwin. > > You are correct about that, something I just learned. See below the sig. > > That leaves Gentoo's process as the only other one with which I am > familiar as a _potential_ candidate for a compatible release in a > greatly reduced amount of time. Then you're working with an entirely different OS every time you build it. Your binaries may vary profoundly based on subtle differences in available libraries at build time, especially for static components, and as a developer you take a significant risk of feature creep breaking your older software. It's great for development, *rotten* for industrial class stability. This is not to discredit the "secret sauce" developers of Gentoo, who integrate a lot of non-compliant open source packages into a powerful, fast, and flexible build structure. By the time you've wrapped a build synchronization structure on it to ensure consistent environments and cross compatibility, you will have rebuilt RPM or deb and rediscovered and had to resolve almost all the same problems. I've repeatedly seen this sort of "I can do it better myself, just the way I think it should work!" with system auditing tools, source control systems, and software building structures. It's usually far, far more efficient to learn the existing structure well and build on it than to start from scratch: a lot of hardwon lessons are very expensive to relearn.