Have you ever installed packages on Linux that just break everything because of those nasty “undefined symbol” errors? Don’t you just hate dependency hell? This is why Gentoo has always been my choice of Linux distribution. When some library comes with bug fixes, just re-emerge it, and re-build everything that depend on that library to make sure everything still runs — at exactly the version you want.

Flameeyes wrote the same here,

So what the deal is? On Gentoo, I was able to get the fixed xine-lib stable altogether with a security fix, so I just had to make Amarok depend on that version to force upgrade for the few who don’t run full updates, and this is good.

Even if there is no ebuild available, it is not difficult to write a new one with the patches, put it into the overlay, emerge it, while keep all other packages sane at the same time. Clearly a distribution for those who would love to do everything by hand, yet still want to keep the hand clean.

Too bad that Gentoo is not as popular in VPS/dedicated servers, and many hosts do not even provide it as an option.