A Meta-Distribution Known for Flexibility and Performance

Gentoo Linux is an open-source, Unix-like operating system that is both flexible and customizable. It stands out among Linux distributions due to its Portage package management system, which allows users to compile the source code locally according to their preferences, often resulting in optimized performance for specific types of computers.

Designed to be modular, portable, and easy to maintain, Gentoo caters to users who desire a system tailored precisely to their needs and hardware.

Named after the fast-swimming gentoo penguin, the distribution emphasizes the potential for speed improvements through machine-specific optimization.

Initially created by Daniel Robbins as Enoch Linux, Gentoo has evolved to support a wide variety of processor architectures and user environments, from desktops to servers.

This branch syncs with the current upstream HEAD branch hourly, providing a fresh look at the entire commit history.

This branch provides a copy of the original CVS repo officially converted to git by Gentoo Linux maintainers, before they fully switched to git.

This is done using the --mirror option, which fetches a full 1:1 clone, not just a subset of git refs as usual. This is important to ensure that all branches and git replace refs are fully downloaded.

➜ git clone --mirror --branch='head' 'https://github.com/historical-repositories/gentoo.git' 'gentoo-historical'
Cloning into bare repository 'gentoo-historical'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 12339178, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (27275/27275), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (11504/11504), done.
remote: Total 12339178 (delta 16629), reused 23718 (delta 15723), pack-reused 12311903
Receiving objects: 100% (12339178/12339178), 2.72 GiB | 27.55 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (9074172/9074172), done.

For more details on the unified view with git replace, please refer to the wiki.

This saves you storage, since only the files are exported.

➜ # go to the target directory
➜ git --git-dir=../gentoo-historical/ archive 499e2f00b49f32976e1749afcd4140dd51831917 | tar -x
➜ ls -l
-rw-r--r--  1 rindeal rindeal  138 Jul 28  2000 header.txt
➜ du -hd0
8.0K    .

➜ # go to the target directory
➜ git clone --no-checkout ../gentoo-historical .
➜ 499e2f00b49f32976e1749afcd4140dd51831917
➜ ls -l
-rw-r--r--  1 rindeal rindeal  138 Jul 28  2000 header.txt
➜ du -hd0
3.2G    .

Footnotes:

The “Browse history since” links have to be regenerated for the latest commits to be browsable (not usually needed though).

branch=head; initial_commit=56bd759df1d0c750a065b8c845e93d5dfa6b549d ;
echo "../../commits/${branch}/?after=$(git rev-list -n1 ${branch})+$(( "$(git rev-list --count "${initial_commit}..${branch}")" - 1 ))"