I hate to admit it, but I think that many people have misinterpreted what Gentoo really is and for whom it is geared. Let's be candid: it's really not about excessive CFLAGS.

Take a good read of this article; it outlines some of the fundamental differences in philosophy between BSD and Linux. In some respects, Gentoo's portage system attempts to reconcile the differences between BSD's ports tree and the absence thereof in Linux as well as the concept of perpetual updates through make buildworld. (I know a guy who's maintained the same install of Gentoo on his laptop for over four years who has kept it up-to-date by using portage without a re-install. Talk about impressive for a Linux distribution.) Yes, it is true that Gentoo does not have a native pkg_add that FreeBSD does to install ports, but what Gentoo offers is as close to that as one can get in Linux; and it is one hell of an improvement on the base concept, might I say. In many respects, if you want to criticize Gentoo over having to compile things to keep it up-to-date, then BSD ought to be brought up for discussion.

Still, it is nice that Gentoo can be updated without having to perform a complete re-installation of the operating system. I hate to say it, but performing "s/old release/new release/g" on /etc/apt/sources.list, apt-get update, and apt-get dist-upgrade is not always as clear as one might expect. When the average user who lacks strong familiarity with dpkg's options is in this situation, I have seen the results: They are very depressing. And while it is true that emerge updates can break, they will at least teach the user in time how to deal with them and learn quite a bit. The same can be said about other distributions, too, so the exclusivity of this issue to Gentoo is really a moot point.

What about customization? Sure, some BSD packages may have makefile-based booleans, but in no way are the centrally documented or are they centrally documented. FreeBSD KNOBS comes close, but it still is not exhaustive. There is no real comparison with USE flags. If BSD had it so well, I wonder why people are trying to port portage to BSD. (I love BSD, mind you, so I am not being unreasonably harsh on it.)

What about fundamental design? It is meant to be flexible and dynamic. Ever notice how many directories are suffixed with ".d" in /etc on Gentoo? A lot are. Yes, some other distributions do use the enumerated ".d" directory paradigm, but none seem to do it as much as Gentoo. Gentoo seems to use ".d" directories whenever it can. So if a new package wants to add something to the path, it merely adds another entry to /etc/env.d which specifies this path. I find this system so great, that I've re-implemented it in Debian/Ubuntu across 100+ computers at my work for the special in-house, non FHS-friendly applications. Talk about a compelling innovation.

And when it comes to configuration changes, Debian has debconf, which allows some packages to preserve changes across updates through configuration file regeneration. While this is nice for preseeding, this is not helpful when there are major updates or when you've made hand-made modifications. Yes, dpkg will bring about a diff of the two files, but does dpkg's integrated configuration diff mechanism really hold its own against Gentoo's dispatch-conf? If you've used dispatch-conf, the answer is no.

Yes, it is true that there are some quality assurance failings with packages in Portage, but let's put that aside for a moment. When it comes to making packages for Gentoo, it certainly beats making them for Debian. Yes, Debian has its nice policy manual, but it is not always up to date or the easiest thing to read. Gentoo's documentation let's a first-time package builder build a package in very little time; whereas Debian or Redhat's systems demand far more time. Look, I am very familiar with creating Debian packages, and I could create one very quickly because I am familiar with it. But since I knew how to create Gentoo packages long ago, I found aspects of Debian's mechanism a bit pedantic, redundant, and inflexible.

What I've outlined here is inexhaustive, but you must be aware that Gentoo is meant for a different audience. Maybe I am predisposed since I've used Linux for so long, but it does a sincere attempt to reconcile the disparities and lackings of the Linux and BSD world. And for as much as some things in Gentoo annoy me, its tradeoffs justify its existence. People really should stop looking at the problems of the open source world and only imagining that a hammer will solve the problem; that's why we have diversity.