I was skimming over this GNU/Linux timeline. I have looked at it several times, but this time something caught my eyes.

http://i.imgur.com/QU9px.png

“Epoch?” I had never paid attention to it, I knew I had heard of it somewhere, but it was never registered in my head. From it, Gentoo seems to be a derivative of this Enoch.

It’s not a derivative but a rename.

The creator, Daniel Robbins, wrote articles1 about from how Enoch got started to the moment before Gentoo 1.0 was released on March 31, 2002. To be honest, I didn’t really know the creator’s name, even I have been using Gentoo for about one year and three months.

He talked about how he involved Stampede Linux’s development, then decided to resign from the team because of unpleasant situation with two people from the developers. Also talked about the difference of perception of open source and contribution to open source community between Epoch and Red Hat and a company which developed a GPL’d compiler. And what he learned from FreeBSD’s autobuild system became a concept of developing Portage. There are more interesting things mentioned in his articles, it’s worth reading, so is the history section on Wikipedia.

After I knew about Enoch, I finally got understand why Gentoo released a special version on October 4, 2009, Ten Years Compiling: 1999-20091, some called it Tenth Anniversary, or just 10.0 LiveDVD. I didn’t really get it at that time.

Within less than two months, Gentoo will be heading to its 11th year.

Should I say “Live long and prosper” to Gentoo?

[1](1, 2) http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/articles/ and http://www.gentoo.org/news/20091004-gentoo-10-years.xml are gone.