Gentoo Prefix: a unified experience on top of another distribution (EUM'21)
Channel: EasyBuild
Date: 2021-01-26

by Fabian Groffen (Gentoo) at the EUM'21 (https://easybuild.io/eum​).
For comments and questions, please use the #eum​ channel in the EasyBuild Slack, see https://easybuild.io/eum/#practical-info​ for details.

People who frequently use different systems know: each and every vendor or distribution typically maintains it own setup of software packages. While tools like sed and awk may give small annoyances on which flags to use based on whether the tools are GNU or BSD-based, something like a compiler may be a completely different version, causing considerable problems for development purposes.

Gentoo Prefix aims to build the exact same software, with the exact same patches and configuration on a multitude of distributions. The major targets are macOS, Linux, and Solaris-based, aiming at ppc, x86 and sparc based architectures.

In this talk we will walk through a bit of the history of the project, how it works, using Gentoo tooling, and its current state.

speaker bio:
Fabian Groffen is a Gentoo Developer since 2006, working mainly on the Prefix project. At that time, Fabian worked on his PhD which he received from the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands in 2009. He keeps a bunch of (old) machines in his basement, which allows him to test Gentoo Prefix on different architectures. Next to his voluntary work for Gentoo, Fabian works as software engineer for a large multinational, specialising on applications written in the C language.