Well I've checked out the gentoo home page and I'm not sure I like it. Does emerge do dependency checking? Gentoo uses sys v init scripts, right? Its conf files in /etc seem to be done in a "gentoo way", more complicated then slack.

I was thinking one solution is just to bootstrap slack current, adding the 2.6 kernel headers, gcc 3.4 and using optimization flags right at the beginning. This would give me the best of both worlds.

Any insights as to what "none hardware related flags" give good results. o2, -fommit-frame-pointer and -pipe for faster compile seem to be a good ones, any others? I'm looking for "none hardware flags" only as I know my hardware... sse mmx mcpu march stuff is easy to figure out.

Has any here ever bootstraped a slack current before?

Emerge does dependency checking. Portage uses baselayout, not sysvinit. I really like Gentoo, and here's why:

The package manager is the best I have ever used. RPM, Deb, and Slackware package management doesn't come even close. Try Gentoo and you will love the package management, I promise. For instance, there is a very handy feature called "USE flags" that will allow you to set what is built into packages. For example, if you set USE="alsa" then alsa support will be built into any package you emerge that has a choice to enable alsa. If you set USE="-alsa" then any application that has the choice will not be built with alsa support. Does that make sense?

Hmm, AFAIK Gentoo != Slackware. Moved to Linux-Distributions.