Many thanks for the info -- actually, the reason I'm looking into Gentoo, again, is specifically because of the "compile from source". I have a particular need

Many thanks for the info -- actually, the reason I'm looking into Gentoo, again, is specifically because of the "compile from source". I have a particular need where this is the only solution that suits it well so I'm glad they haven't abandoned that (I seem to recall that about the time I left Gentoo, they had just introduced binary sources for the kernel and such to speed up getting a system working "from nothing"). I'll poke around for information on alternatives to etc-update. That really was a bear and where I'm planning on using this I'll want to have that work with a lot less overhead.