Once a completed Haiku is put out to press, interest in this operating system is going to greatly increase (although Glass Elevator is something that I really look forward to).
However, in the meantime between the release of Haiku R1 and the beginning of Glass Elevator development, I’m hypothesizing that there will be people who are interested in redistributing their own version of Haiku, just like how there are so many Linux and BSD distributions (300+, according to Wikipedia). Alot of them will be LiveCD/LiveUSB-based distros, which has become obligatory in almost every Unix-like system (hell, there’s even a LiveCD for AROS, the Amiga Research Operating System).
Others will take after Gentoo and aim for a customized, optimized operating system for their particular hardware architecture (x86 or otherwise); hence, they will seek to recompile the OS from source.
So, while this is a hypothesis and I’m certain that the devs could care less about the “recompiling from source” fad that emanates from Gentoo, I’m wondering if such an (optional) provision for building a system from source is possible for a system like Haiku, or if its Unix-specific.
Me, I’d prefer to use the Gobo approach, which is cleaner than Portage (at least if it isn’t Unix-specific).
Anyway, just wonderin’.
