And despite a choice of packaging systems (RedHat's .rpm, Debian's .deb, Gentoo's .ebuild...), Linux has nothing close to the flexibility of the original BSD port system...

...Until now! I discovered the GAR architecture, which is a port of the original BSD port system using GNU Make.

This system has been designed originally to develop the Linux on a Bootable Business Card (Linux BBC) project. Since then, it has been sucessfully used by both the GARNOME and Konstruct, which are both build system for their respective desktop environment.

Since a year, I started to work on a build system for the FairyLinux project. This project is a small embedded Linux distro builder, using a set of makefiles to build a useable system. At that time, I had no knowledge of the BSD port system, so I rolled my own targets for building the system, based on my past experience. This is working nicely, and I used it into some of my projects.

However, since I discovered GAR, I really think I will move to it as a more standard way of doing things!