[jrockway]

My Linux setup is like this, but it's nice to have the "long tail" readily available. Stuff like SBCL and GHC are a pain to manually compile (or get from ports), and this leads to a cycle where since there's no GHC, there's no GHC. Compare to Debian where the latest version is almost always available, and so building $latest + 1 is trivial.

[silentbicycle]

I know where you're coming from - trying to update a common lisp port years ago got me into porting stuff. I'm happiest with OpenBSD, and I've done a fair bit of porting. (Not everything made it into the tree, though.) These days I'm a bit wary of depending too much on anything I can't bootstrap.