What do you learn in LFS that you don't learn in Gentoo?
I have started with Gentoo several years ago (and never tried LFS) but I really learned a lot how Linux works. In Gentoo, you can basically do everything. You are just supported in that by a really nice package manager. But you are starting from scratch. You are bootstrapping the system, setting up compiler flags, setting up build flags and decide about every single package you want to have on your system.
Right, and then Portage makes everything and puts it into place. And then you use Gentoo's init scripts. And then you use Gentoo's package manager. And so forth.
What you learn is exactly what it is that the distribution does, which parts of the system are decided by it, which things are convention and which things are configuration.
Gentoo's great, I ran it for several years, but I'm still glad I did LFS one semester and could really see what's going on under the hood.
But nothing is really decided on Gentoo. You can easily use another init-system for example (all the common ones are in Portage). You can also use a different package manager. I recall that there was a famous replacement for emerge; forgot its name right now.
Otherwise, I don't see much difference between
./configure
make install
and
emerge x
Except that in the first case, you have to deal with some exceptions where it doesn't work that way. But not sure if that knowledge is really valuable.
