I'm also a big Gentoo fan. I never used BSDs much, though I imagine you would be familiar with the following: - With Gentoo you would be able to setup masks

I'm also a big Gentoo fan. I never used BSDs much, though I imagine you would be familiar with the following: - With Gentoo you would be able to setup masks for a specific version of glibc and compile everything against it, stage the binaries and distribute them en mass to the other systems. This would allow you to stay with a specific version of a library and less dependent on the whims of the distro staff. - You also have the option of using a cluster of compilers to compile the packages, though you may not want your production machines to be a part of the cluster. - You have control over the CPU optimization flags. - You have control over package features. This is the equivalent of turning them on or off with ./configure --enable-xxxx, but it is abstracted away into USE flags. - Each package is downloaded from upstream, sometimes with Gentoo-specific patches applied to them. In otherwords, you have access to pristine sources as the authors intended. - You can also define an "overlay" so you can write your own custom ebuilds, should you have specific patches you want to apply to any or all of the packages - You can use the overlay to do an internal release of your proprietary software using Portage. You can define package dependencies with your proprietary software. It is a lot more work than setting up a Debian or an Ubuntu box, but you also get more control.