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Stampede and the freaks

The story of Gentoo is inextricably linked with that of Daniel Robbins, a programmer, writer and consultant from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Robbins came across Linux when he was a sysadmin at the University of New Mexico and tried Debian on a server. As he recounts in his three part history of the Gentoo project:

"Linux offered something I had never seen before. If I had to put that magical something into words, I'd call it potential: the potential to change, to improve, to fix things, and yes, even to break things. As I upgraded to new kernel versions I saw Linux improve before my eyes and transform itself almost daily. And I was along for the ride! I was a part of the transformation. It was fun."

It could be said that Gentoo became Robbins' way of replicating his early experience of Linux and its community for other users.

Gentoo has its roots in Robbins' work on Stampede Linux in the late 90s. Stampede is a long gone Linux distribution which prided itself on raw performance. Robbins became involved with Stampede first in helping others through IRC, and later as a developer, who set himself the task of rewriting Stampede's slp packaging system to a format that was more extensible, more compact and easier to parse.

Robbins was a valued contributor to Stampede Linux, but encountered difficulties with members of the community who disagreed with his approach to slp. As Robbins tells it, there was continual interference from "two lower-level Stampede developers (who) wanted to control the slpv6 project", and as a result he was forced to spend "hours in heated development discussions defending the proposal against their attacks."

Communities will have differences and sometimes the differences will be damaging and divisive, but Robbins took it personally and saw the dissenters as 'freaks' and spoilers with nothing to offer.

"You can identify these guys pretty easily", he wrote. "They're the ones who aren't writing any code (nor do they have any intention to). Instead they spend their time talking about more important things. You know, those managerial issues... So one day I decided that it would be easier to create my own distribution rather than have to put up with the two freaks. I resigned from Stampede development and started making plans to produce my own distro."

These kinds of conflicts have come back to hit the Gentoo community and Robbins himself more than once over the intervening years.

Stampede Linux went through some highs and lows and finally closed its doors on 1 March 2002, promising to "emerge from this vacation as a stronger, better distribution." The Stampede Linux web site still stands like an eerie sentinel from a distant past, but Stampede has yet to re-appear.

Lone wolf

When Robbins left Stampede in early 1999, he set to work on a distro of his own, to be known as Enoch, which gave him an opportunity to realise his own vision of what a Linux distribution could be. He was the sole developer, and was able to focus on his own preoccupations. The objective of Enoch would be to maximise performance and CPU utilisation, and to minimise bloat.

Being a lone wolf, Robbins "had to write scripts to automate everything," and build a complete system for generating a Linux distribution from scratch, "so that I would have a minimal amount of time-consuming, repetitive labour." These scripts became the basis of ebuild and a fundamental ingredient of the Gentoo automated build process.

"I quickly saw that writing simple scripts for the kind of automation I needed wasn't going to be enough," he wrote. "I needed to design a complete system for generating a Linux distribution from scratch. I tentatively called it the ebuild system and got to work. The ebuild system would be able to automatically create all the distribution binaries, automating everything from unpacking and patching the sources to compilation, installation and packaging. After getting a basic ebuild prototype working, I started creating ebuild scripts for the key components of a Linux distribution (like gcc, glibc, binutils, util-linux, and friends)."

The one and only release of Enoch was announced in May 1999. "Enoch is an advanced GNU/Linux distribution for the x86 PC Architecture," claimed the announcement, "designed to bring your Linux experience into a new dimension. Or something like that."

Next: Scratching the compiler

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