Not long ago Gentoo announced binary packages for Gentoo! So even if you're not using Gentoo Build Publisher you can still use Gentoo and take advantage of binary packages. However there is still a place for Gentoo Build Publisher. There are a few things that can be done with GBP that are not in the scope of Gentoo's binary host. They include:
- Binaries built with your own USE flags
- Support for architectures other than amd64 and arm64
- Binaries can be optimized to specific CPUs.
- Ability to apply one's own user patches to packages
- Stable or testing ebuilds. Your choice. Or do a mix!
- Tag builds and have different machines follow different tags
- Support for multiple machines with your own tailored setups
- Builds created at whatever frequency you choose
- The ability to "roll back" to a specific set of binaries and portage
- The ability to keep publish a machine's configuration along with the packages
- A nice multi-machine dashboard
- Managability via a neat command-line interface
That's a lot. And with version 2 (I just tagged version 2) you get more:
Plugins! There are now plugins such as gbp-ps for finding out what's going on with your GBP setup. And there's also gbp-notifications for when you really want to know when new (binary) packages are available but only for your machine(s) you can be notified. There is also the ability to write custom plugins and GraphQL queries as well as subcommands for gbpcli.
There is now a machine-specific page in the web interface.
There's going to be more to come, so stay tuned.