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[Jason Slaughter]

>  It is strongly suggested to always run "emerge --pretend <appname>"
>before actually running "emerge <appname>".  Emerge *WILL* attempt to
>build+install every necessary dependancy.
>
I agree that Gentoo is great for this, but as a long time Debian user 
(and Gentoo user too) I feel I need to step in on Debian's behalf. :) 
It's mind-boggling to me that even in the latest Fedora and Mandrake, 
dependancies can be an issue! Debian acts as Gentoo does in this 
respect, and apt-get will grab whatever it needs to install your 
package, even if that includes X-Windows, KDE, Gnome, or whatever.

On a related note, I used Gentoo for a while, and it's a great distro, 
but I found that compiling everything was a bit of a waste, and it 
required a lot of "set-up" time to configure each package I emerged. The 
way I run Debian now is to run off of Debian 'testing' (or 
'sid/unstable' if it's a "play" box, but never 'stable'), and then I 
apt-build any packages that would really benefit from optimization.

For instance, a few weeks ago I built a PVR based on Freevo. I installed 
a base (console-only) Debian testing system, added the Freevo source 
(and a few others) to my sources.list file, and then did a "apt-get 
install freevo". This installed freevo, minimal x-windows, and 
everything I needed to make it run. The base packages are all compiled 
for i386, so for tvtime, mplayer, and mencoder I did an "apt-build 
--reinstall install tvtime mplayer-k6." This optimized these three key 
applications for the Athlon XP, and the various multimediate extensions 
(MMX2, SSE, etc).

So anyhow, for those who think Gentoo might be a bitch much, look into 
Debian testing or unstable along with apt-build for the "important" 
packages. Don't use Debian stable (except for mission-critial servers) 
because the packages are too far out of date.
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