The peculiar world of Gentoo package testing

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2024-11-10 19:00:03

While discussing uv tests with Fedora developers, it occurred to me how different your average Gentoo testing environment is — not only from these used upstream, but also from these used by other Linux distributions. This article will be dedicated exactly to that: to pointing out how it’s different, what does that imply and why I think it’s not a bad thing.

The first important thing about Gentoo is that it is a source-first distribution. The best way to explain this is to compare it with your average “binary” distribution.

In a “binary” distribution, source and binary packages are somewhat isolated from one another. Developers work with source packages (recipes, specs) and use them to build binary packages — either directly, or via an automation. Then the binary packages hit repositories. The end users usually do not interface with sources at all — may well not even be aware that such a thing exists.

In Gentoo, on the other hand, source packages are the first degree citizens. All users use source repositories, and can optionally use local or remote binary package repositories. I think the best way of thinking about binary packages is: as a form of “cache”.

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