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Gentoo Announces 'Seeds'
rvale writes "Gentoo has announced a new project called Seeds. Aiming to provide out of the box images for various common tasks, it could be the answer to the common complaint that installing and customizing Gentoo takes too long. However, with other developers and Council members complaining that the project was improperly set up and those backing the project refusing to back off, lending weight to recent claims that Gentoo is suffering from management problems, will what could be a massive step forward degenerate into a repeat of the Sunrise disaster?"
The Neo-Vickys will put all their resources into stopping them.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
NO MORE!
Spend more time on fucking Q & A. I'm tired of trying to talk people into Gentoo only to find out that the tree is half-fucked all the time [like packages marked stable requiring other libs NOT IN THE FUCKING TREE YET].
No more extras, fix the base!!!
This is the problem with OSS. Everyone wants to get famous for the next big breakthrough and nobody wants to maintain the shit.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I havn't used Gentoo since its early days, when there where no big binary downloads for it. My question is, if you aren't going to compile from source to get that extra level of customizability, what's the difference between Gentoo and say, Debian testing/unstable?
Daniel Robbins becomes a Gentoo Developer again.
Welcome back.
Posting anonymously, because I'm a Gentoo developer and I don't feel like getting fired for speaking out against a certain clique.
Gentoo is, at this point, royally fucked, and this is a perfect illustration of why. The project no longer encourages technical discussion, debate or getting things done. Anyone trying to have technical discussion is called out and accused of flaming by the once great Seemant (who has not done any development himself for years) and his horde of fanboy minions (most noticably, Jakub) who skipped the usual recruitment process (Seemant throws a hissy fit any time any of his recruits are rejected for failing the quiz), who would rather that people did things without planning and jumped ahead with the kind of fuckups that OS X and Sunrise were than that anyone had a disagreement. Instead, it favors fancy announcements and poorly thought out publicity under the guise of 'making things easier for the users'.
If you look closely, you'll see that Gentoo has not actually done anything for about two years now. Even an attempt to change the color of the website failed after over a year of work. And this is a shame, because it has so much potential. Honestly, I don't know how to fix things. I don't have enough time or enough of a reputation to persuade people to learn from past mistakes (yes, this is Sunrise all over again).
For those who have no idea what exactly the "sunrise disaster" in the summary is supposed to mean, like I did, here's the link: Project sunrise.
Basilisk Digital
Whether or not making gentoo installable without spending endless painful hours of your time on it is a good thing?
That's already been done. It's called STAGE3
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I personally benefited from the Ubuntu 'server' install CD. One of the options was clearly labeled something to the effect of, "INSTALL LAMP SERVER". (Linux, Apache, MySql, Php) In no time at all, I went from bare metal to up and running Drupal. I can't tell you how much of a time saver it was. (And out-of-the-box pretty secure, unnecessary daemons all disabled.)
"Q&A" is Question and Answer.
"QA" is Quality Assurance.
Both are applicable. The former is for people who are tired of being told to RTFM. The latter is for people who are tired of things not working as they should when the do RTFM.
I'll take the opportunity to pimp Source Mage Linux (http://www.sourcemage.org). SMGL is far simpler, easier, and faster to set up than Gentoo. The system management scripts are fast, and work astoundingly well, and the devs are always in irc and love to help. Just an all-around nicer bunch of guys and a better distro than Gentoo's seen in a few years.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
Well gee, Tom, then maybe you should stop recommending a buggy piece of crap, you fucking useless waste of space. On second thought, don't. The more crappy opinions you spout, the faster other people will relise what a fucktard you truly are.
Love,
Mom.
I chose Gentoo specifically for the ability to build packages
with the features I wanted, and not to have to depend on packages
used in someone elses system layout and choices.
Seeds is a waste of time and resources. If I wanted a distro based
around someone elses packages I would have chosen Suse or Debian.
Idiots...
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
I use and like Gentoo Linux, primarily because it is a distribution that lets me install virtually anything, including odd obscure scientific software, with a minimum of fuss. Additionally, many times when things work, they REALLY work because the distribution doesn't get in the way.
;-)
But I'm considering trying KUbuntu for my next go-around. In addition to the new software compile requirements gradually outrunning my computer's hardware, I must agree that the smoothness of massive universal upgrades just hasn't felt "as clean" of late. The most important environments for my linux box I will usually wind up building myself anyway (Maxima, Axiom, BRL-CAD, various Lisp packages) and for the rest of it I'm less interested in building for hours upon end for minor upgrades. Particularly if there is a decent chance of introducing problems.
Conceptually, I like the idea of a system that can build itself from source code - there's something clean about it, and also self sufficient. If a system can build itself, it means most everything on the system is pretty solid as far as having what it needs in place. But waning horse power and a focus on things other than endless system tweaking may motivate me to shift.
Originally, I loved that Gentoo let me turn on exactly what I needed to get my hardware to work well, and that was my primary motivation for using it. I still love its documentation, and that I suspect may someday outlive the main Gentoo project itself. But I think it might be time to check out the alternatives again, and lower my monthly power bill
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
...all they can do is submit bug reports, and use what is offered. If the coder part of the community doesn't want bug reports from normal random users-then don't take them! Don't ask for them! Keep the buzilla thing closed off, a total wall, blessed developers only. Take it further, don't distribute it except internally to yourselves! That's one way to solve the "complaints" problem!
Gentoo Seed Destiny?
Philosophy.
I hate to admit it, but I think that many people have misinterpreted what Gentoo really is and for whom it is geared. Let's be candid: it's really not about excessive CFLAGS.
Take a good read of this article; it outlines some of the fundamental differences in philosophy between BSD and Linux. In some respects, Gentoo's portage system attempts to reconcile the differences between BSD's ports tree and the absence thereof in Linux as well as the concept of perpetual updates through make buildworld. (I know a guy who's maintained the same install of Gentoo on his laptop for over four years who has kept it up-to-date by using portage without a re-install. Talk about impressive for a Linux distribution.) Yes, it is true that Gentoo does not have a native pkg_add that FreeBSD does to install ports, but what Gentoo offers is as close to that as one can get in Linux; and it is one hell of an improvement on the base concept, might I say. In many respects, if you want to criticize Gentoo over having to compile things to keep it up-to-date, then BSD ought to be brought up for discussion.
Still, it is nice that Gentoo can be updated without having to perform a complete re-installation of the operating system. I hate to say it, but performing "s/old release/new release/g" on /etc/apt/sources.list, apt-get update, and apt-get dist-upgrade is not always as clear as one might expect. When the average user who lacks strong familiarity with dpkg's options is in this situation, I have seen the results: They are very depressing. And while it is true that emerge updates can break, they will at least teach the user in time how to deal with them and learn quite a bit. The same can be said about other distributions, too, so the exclusivity of this issue to Gentoo is really a moot point.
.
What about customization? Sure, some BSD packages may have makefile-based booleans, but in no way are the centrally documented or are they centrally documented. FreeBSD KNOBS comes close, but it still is not exhaustive. There is no real comparison with USE flags. If BSD had it so well, I wonder why people are trying to port portage to BSD. (I love BSD, mind you, so I am not being unreasonably harsh on it.)
What about fundamental design? It is meant to be flexible and dynamic. Ever notice how many directories are suffixed with ".d" in /etc on Gentoo? A lot are. Yes, some other distributions do use the enumerated ".d" directory paradigm, but none seem to do it as much as Gentoo. Gentoo seems to use ".d" directories whenever it can. So if a new package wants to add something to the path, it merely adds another entry to /etc/env.d which specifies this path. I find this system so great, that I've re-implemented it in Debian/Ubuntu across 100+ computers at my work for the special in-house, non FHS-friendly applications. Talk about a compelling innovation.
And when it comes to configuration changes, Debian has debconf, which allows some packages to preserve changes across updates through configuration file regeneration. While this is nice for preseeding, this is not helpful when there are major updates or when you've made hand-made modifications. Yes, dpkg will bring about a diff of the two files, but does dpkg's integrated configuration diff mechanism really hold its own against Gentoo's dispatch-conf? If you've used dispatch-conf, the answer is no.
Yes, it is true that there are some quality assurance failings with packages in Portage, but let's put that aside for a moment. When it comes to making packages for Gentoo, it certainly beats making them for Debian. Yes, Debian has its nice policy manual, but it is not always up to date or the easiest thing to read. Gentoo's documentation let's a first-time package builder build a package in very little time; whereas Debian or Redhat's syste
Even the Politburo concurs with Process of Elimination http://process-of-elimination.net
So, let's recap. Debian is having to pay developers in order to get a working distribution out of the door anywhere near on-schedule; NetBSD is embroiled in a scandal surrounding the undue influence of Wasabi on the core team -when it's not flayling wildly trying to cope with its' other management problems, and now it emerges that gentoo has been stuck in a political quagmire for years holding back even the most frivilous of changes (forget any major ones).
We've reached the point where all-volunteer, non-commercial unix-style Operating Systems are drowning in personality conflicts; and the only technical strides and achievements are coming largely from private companies (Sun, Redhat).
This quaint social experiment of altruistic development has shown two things: as much as you may dislike corporate culture, corporate structure and the incentive of a paycheck are what is needed to gain any sort of professional-quality software going out of the door on a regular basis.
Remove the structure, remove the incentive and before long you're left with nothing more than quibbling dorks and software packages like gentoo which half of the time are badly broken because no one can be bothered to work on them.
Who has a gentoo system that works perfectly fine? Plus my system is entirely from the unstable branch.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
I have been engaged in massive updates to my system recently, prompted by:
1. GCC update (and the effect on libstdc++)
2. OpenSSL (requiring a re-build of all packages depending on OpenSSL)
3. A large number of package updates recently.
Now, running the updates using revdep-rebuild for libcrypto and libssl has not got without any problems, but they have usually been solved by upgrading to the latest stable version of the package. So, I know from personal experience that the situation is simply not as bad as the parent claims. I have several systems, from servers to desktops, so I have a good range of packages.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Huzzah!
And Sayonora and Kororaa and Emission, etc.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I've been on Gentoo since RH EOL'd RH9. I switch all my desktops and servers to it and 95% of the time everything works just great. I emerge sync and -uDN almost every day and it's a very rare day when portage is broken. portage is the real beauty of Gentoo. It's the Lincoln's Axe of distros, and that's a good thing. Y'know Lincoln's Axe, right? How old is this axe? 150 years old, but of course no one piece is because it got a new handle, then a new axe head, then a new handle, then a new head...
I maintain 6+ Gentoo boxes this way and I've never had to re-install for any reason other than a h/w failure. About twice a year I have to do more than just emerge -uDN world to get a stable system again, but I will gladly pay that for never having to do a painful full-system upgrade.
Political problems aside (and what organization doesn't have those, be they FOSS or commercial?), it's a great, largely stable distro.
It does address a criticism often directed at Gentoo.
So now, no more waiting to get the tool you need.
Good idea, devs!
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
There's hope. Technically, at least.
It's also the default installation method as of 2006.0 (or thereabouts.)
Personally I prefer STAGE1, but you can use STAGE3 to get up and running quickly and then replace the binary packages with built-from-source later.
And Sayonora and Kororaa and Emission, etc.
VidaLinux, lxnay, Sabayon....
Excellent point! These distro's are even easier than a stage3 and still give you the ablility to update everything as you wish by setting up your use flags and running
emerge -uDav rebuild
(or something like that).
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I use and like Gentoo Linux, primarily because it is a distribution that lets me install virtually anything, including odd obscure scientific software, with a minimum of fuss. Additionally, many times when things work, they REALLY work because the distribution doesn't get in the way.
I dont find any (practical) difference between Gentoo and an distro like SUSE. And all the fuss seems to be about how difficult its to use Gentooo!!!
Tat Tvam Asi
Wait... there's Gentoo documentation that actually is useful, and expands upon important common topics and not the specialized one in 30000 people use topics?
I disbelieve.
I completely agree with you that people who are unfamiliar with Gentoo, are largely ignorant of what it's like to actually run a Gentoo system. CFLAGS? I don't really run any fancy CFLAGS. USE flags? If a program can benefit from a certain use flag, I add it. It's Portage and the Gentoo toolset that really makes Gentoo a joy to work with. I am always hearing people complain about how hard it is to install, and how it always breaks. I always ask myself, "What the hell are they doing"? I have been running the same Gentoo install for at least 3.5 years now on my desktop. I play games, surf the internet, write papers, download stuff on it. It also acts as my wireless router, MythTV machine, and file/ftp server. I emerge -uD world at least once a week and encountering a problem is a rarity. I just don't get it. How can everyone be having such a devil of a time maintaining just a basic Gentoo "surf the internet" computer, when I've had such an easy time for so long?
"s/old release/new release/g"
bah, me i use s/stable/stable/g on servers and s/unstable/unstable/g on desktops when there is a new release of Debian.
I honestly do not understand why you need to spend so much effort to get this distro going. You may want to consider Debian as an alternative; I've been running Debian testing and I don't remeber the tree being broken even once.
I'm an Ubuntu user here, and I've never had apt-get update break anything (without having been responsible for the breakage myself through fiddling with the configs). I think Ubuntu users would be furious if a security update wound up breaking their system.
As people who rely on a Linux computer, we really do put our fates in the hands of apt-get / yum / emerge, and it's a real feeling of betrayal when these tasks let us down. I remember in the old days of Red Hat 9 how horrible up2date was in this regard.
Perhaps I'm wrong, and it's only a few loud people doing this... but as a potential Gentoo user reading slashdot, I wouldn't get the most comfortable feeling about relying on emerge. It's not that I don't have the knowledge or desire to fix things if they're broken by the package manager. It's that I don't have the time. My work is too demanding for me to spend a lot of time cleaning up after broken packages.
I have just spent the last 2 days trying to install Gentoo. First I tried the newest 2006.1 LiveDVD. It wouldn't get past gpm (general purpose mouse), so I disabled gpm, and it got stuck on the next section.
I went to IRC, #gentoo@freenet.org and the sage advice I got was: um, yeah 2006.1 is bjorked, try 2005.1.
So I did. I popped in the LiveCD, let it boot and upon once complete I had a CLI. (surprised me, all other LiveCD's I have used actually booted to a GUI) Not a problem, I can handle this. I followed the directions in the handbook exactly. Everything went smoothly untill it came time to reboot (after setting up grub).
Reboot. Grub panics because it can't find what it needs. I got the edit menu and try to fix it. No luck.
So I go through the whole process again. This time I even went so far as to make my partitions the exact same size so that everything would be verbatim. reboot, same grub panic.
Third try; I avoid the Stage 3 install and do everything live via the online handbook.
It works! Glorious Rapture I can now boot to a CLI. The handbook on the CD is DIFFERENT AND WRONG. The online handbook is accurate and worked.
So now it's time to start installing apps. MC and rar were the first to be installed, portage was complaining about using an old profile, so I switched it manually. It still didn't like it, so thanks to help on IRC I emerged eselect and was able to change my emerge profile. I test it with a couple other small apps, and errors are all gone.
Now I need a web-browser, so I can google for answers to questions that I have. emerge lynx
Emerge now throws up some access violation. Next I try links, same error.
I think to myself, I'll get back to those later. so I emerge fluxbox (expecting to get xorg too, but I didn't despite flux's obvious dependencies).
Flux installs with no errors.
startx -> nothing
ok, so now emerge xorg-x11, and I get another Access Violation. I toss in a knoppix CD, get online to google these access Violations, turns out that it is (possibly) due to a font conflict between 2 differnet packages that need to be installed (that both need the same font).
I quit. Back to Debian for me. Apt I missed you.
I have tried:
redhat, mandrake, suse, slackware, DSL, puppy, linspire, debian, ubuntu, and now gentoo.
They have all caused me grief. But I still love debian.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Tom,
You might try FreeBSD. Although it's not immune from code out-of-sync'ness, the team at FreeBSD ride them doggies a LOT harder than they seem to over on your side o' the creek. You'd be welcome.
If BSD had it so well, I wonder why people are trying to port portage to BSD. (I love BSD, mind you, so I am not being unreasonably harsh on it.)
;) now I'm off eating rice crackers, laters...
To draw an analogy: if the Linux kernel was so well, why would Debian try to make Debian GNU/KNetBSD and Debian GNU/KFreeBSD (BSD kernel with Debian (APT, glibc, plus all normal other software)).
The answer to both questions is simple: because they can. I've not seen anyone in the *BSD community being particulary happy about Portage. Or adopting it. I've not seen Free|Open|Net|DragonflyBSD adopting it. They're happy with Pkgsrc mostly last time i checked. They're not against it either; why would they? What purpose does it serve? Its F/OSS after all.
The equiv to USE flags on my BSD systems is FLAVOR flag. It does more than enough for me on my BSD systems. If I don't like to compile I simply type pkg_add -r package_name and it just works by downloading that package from RELEASE. If I need a certain flavor, I add that. For example squid-2.5.STABLE12p1-transparent instead of squid-2.5.STABLE12p1. Ofcourse, that may have been updated in STABLE, and packages for non-x86 are not really updated, so then I need to a CVS update for my ports tree... and do it your way. I don't like to compile myself, would trust a MD5/SHA1/RMD160/GPGed repository more, but so be it. You guys automated that, made it a bit simpler, but if you know what you're doing such is not necessary. Problematic is it when you just took a lot of time to compile AND TEST your application, and it works (or doesn't). Who the hell would use Gentoo in a productive environment performing such tasks with dangerous USE flags?
Also, Gentoo is Linux, internally suffers from fragmentation, and its users frequently piss the hell out of F/OSS developers because of their clueless and bogus bug reports -- due to things such as USE flags. The only useful purpose I can think of is.. catching bugs in GCC
Security updates never break the system (although they may require config changes that are always very well-documented in the update process itself, and on the gentoo website/forums/wiki). Most people run at least some packages from the ~arch branch (unstable), though, and breakage does sometimes happen there (which is usually well-documented as well).
Java especially, has given trouble lately, but there is now a system in place that allows several 1.4 and 1.5 JDKs and JREs to coexist, with each user able to choose their own preferred JDK/JRE, and the system defaults set separately from that as well. Also, packages that require a certain version of the JDK to build properly can now specify that, so you can use JDK 1.5 for most things, and something that is not yet 1.5-compatible will still build and run just fine.
I switched away from Gentoo maybe two months ago, to Ubuntu, after two years of Gentoo.
I was goddamn tired of updating over night, rebooting in the morning and finding that maybe a half dozen things broke between stable tree updates.
Please, for the rest of us, just fork already. It'll save everyone a lot of headaches.
Portage is too good of a system to be allowed to be made irrelevant.
Very simular to my expereince even though it was 2004. I managed to persist in getting a working system, kde and everything. BUt it got to be too much portage was almost always broken for what I wanted. I had to google for missing packages to get stuff to install. Im using SUSE right now, but its giving me crap as well. I haven't had time to mess with it, I think I can fix it. If not then I'll give Debian another try. Suse was the only one I could get other than Gentoo to work on this box. Its not there fault really, there's some serious hardware problem with my DVD drive. I'll get a new one before trying another install.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Gentoo was easy enough when it was a shell install with a kick ass handbook. Let the GUI/framebuffer installers fork.
Debian can talk shit about Gentoo's problems after they mend fences with Ubuntu, fix the administrative bottlenecks that made Sarge take so long from freeze to release, stop hemmhoraging developers to other projects with higher productivity and lower bullshit political overhead, and generally find more constructive things to do than engage in year-long license flamewars (like, maybe develop and maintain a Linux distro, or something). Until then, comments about getting one's own house in order are best kept on the debian-navel-gazing mailing list.
(As the parent said, and needs to be modded up ...)
Not being familiar with it, what was disasterous about Project Sunrise? Is it a giant pile of multiple WTFs, like the "You aren't supposed to report bugs, you're supposed to FIX them" bit that I only just noticed?
I feel like a complete noob for asking this, but ... what's an "overlay", in the context that the Gentoo people are using it? I feel like i kindof get it, but an far from grokking it, let alone being able to discuss it intelligently. :)
I think I will.
I was under the impression that stage 1 installations are now redundant, you may as well just start form a stage 2 as the updates done afterwards negate anything done in a stage 1 install.
I love Gentoo's approach to Linux, and I wish I could still contribute. But the project is overmanaged in all the wrong areas (trying to make all the developers play nice), and undermanaged in areas that need some whip-cracking, like junior devs announcing absurdly ambitious projects long before they're ready.
To quote ciaranm:
What Gentoo should do is produce a standardized base version for the Mac Intel line -- MacBooks, MacPros, iMacs, MacMini. These machines have standardized hardware, and the iMac especially doesn't lend itself to fooling around with the internals. Buy a Mac, pop in the Gentoo CD, fool around with some of the minor points, and then you have an instant computer.
given gentoo is GPL (no?), is it possible to bring create another distro with the current code base to make it more stable?
Indeed it is. Get someone good to lead it, and I'll gladly join up and start maintaining ebuilds again. ciaranm took a step in that direction with Paludis, but it's just a package manager. We need a whole new distro.
Half the beauty of Gentoo is that you don't need "experimental" and "stable" branches, you don't need to "port" to every different architecture. The ARCH flags and profiles take care of all this very simply when used properly. The problem is that more and more, they're not being used properly. Dependencies get screwed up and you can't even do a fresh install anymore without getting a portage error.
I really want to contribute to a Gentoo-like distro again, as long as it's being managed by people who know what they're doing and know that technical debate is critical. Somebody please start it, and leave Gentoo to the self-obsessed power-mongers and clueless newbies who should have never been allowed to become devs.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Thats odd. 'emerge world' works just fine for me. :P
The only time 'emerge world' will break something is if a new binary incompatible library comes out or something drastic changes.
A recent example is libexpat which is solved by running 'revdep-rebuild' overnight.
I concur. I've been running various distros for some time now, but I always come back to Gentoo. My MythTV/web/file server has been running it for somewhere between 3 and 4 years now, and never once have I had a major complication with the OS (MythTV hosing all of my recordings and me deleting the database like an idiot are not related to Gentoo). I've even switched the actual hardware it's running on, booted into a generic kernel, and everything worked fine.
Sure, it may take a little bit of time to get it up and running, but it's a learning process. And I usually don't have to deal with the dependency hell that some distros bring to the table when I try to upgrade a package that has a dependency version that is no longer in the tree.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
Weee, I can compile stuff!
I'm making it faster because my CPU optimizes code better than someone elses!
It is actually quite simple.
They are not the intended audience.
Gentoo is not something for the person who does not want to learn and does not want to tinker. As someone else in these comments posted, Gentoo asks you what you want to do, then proceeds to do *exactly* what you asked it. If you tell it to do something stupid, it does something stupid. The sheer number of people that see the whole pam-login/shadow blocker as an error just goes to show that the people do not understand Gentoo are the ones that complain the most. I'll be honest. I'm glad to see those people leaving in droves. Gentoo is not for them. It never was. People seem to forget that the Gentoo developers call Gentoo a metadistribution. We allow you to build what you want. This doesn't mean that everything is done for you. Over the past few weeks, I've been encouraging certain people to start using Ubuntu. These are the ones that don't read any documentation, and either ask a question for every prompt/response scenario, or bash everything they don't understand. Seriously, go to Ubuntu. You'll like it much better there. What Gentoo is really about is customization. That is its biggest strength. If you're not willing to put in the time, then you're definitely using the Wrong Tool(tm) for your job. Find a better tool.
Yes, Gentoo breaks things all the time if your running on the unstable (~x86 for me). I love to keep up with the latest versions of software and unfortunately whenever I do a world compile every month or so it not only takes forever, but a handful of packages will fail to compile with various errors that I don't understand and then it's time to hit the forums and hope that someone else has the solution.
I've been using Gentoo for over 2 years and been using it exclusively for my Desktop for almost that length of time. It's taken me ages and ages to customize to my liking, but once it's there I don't have to reinstall my system ever again unless I upgrade to a different machine arch. Part of the pain should be accepted as upgrading GCC and glibc isn't exactly a simple thing to do and I don't know any other disto that allows you to upgrade your entire distribution without reinstall over the net.
Too bad it doesn't work and you still have to compile stuff. Last time I tried Stage 3 it compiled for ages and then finally failed at some point. I'm no newbie to Linux (using it 12 years now) but I couldn't get the stupid thing to work right. After wasting a bunch of time searching for answers (not to mention the wasted time compiling) I gave up.
I don't like to point fingers, but Ubuntu recently had it's share of update problems too, even on the stable Dapper release. Two updates a few weeks apart that both broke Ubuntu's stable release. First the xorg-core issue (http://www.ubuntu.com/UpgradeIssue) and later another one, even after measures were taken after the first issue. My desktop was affected by this. Gentoo users have had similar problems in the past. I've personally had issues both when updating really fresh updates, and when updating after months of not updating.
In my opinion this kind of problem is worse for Ubuntu users, since Gentoo users are usually more familiar with the command-line and how to access forum websites from the CLI. Still it shows that no distribution is risk-free. In my experience Debian stable is the safest distro with the least downtime during updates. Ubuntu is a bit riskier and has to prove itself after the last two problems. Gentoo is even riskier, and hard to QA because of the many possible configurations.
For me, Gentoo is worth the occasional problem, but if you want to be safe go for Debian stable at the moment.
Stage 3 plus GRP (binary packages) would be a better choice. Seriously, stage 3 gets you a baseline system with little in the way of applications. Most folks will want X, Gnome and/or KDE, OpenOffice or equivalent, media software, CD/DVD burning software, etc., and the first three on that list take a very long time to compile. Granted, when you update you'll still be rebuilding everything, but you'll at least have a usable machine while that's going on in the background.
Addressing the main article's concerns, though: package maintainers must be the most important workers in the system. When a distro stops updating, it dies. It's lifeblood. Sure, new projects are sexy, but they must be seen for what they are: risky experiments with little chance of success. Many, many projects fail in the business world -- go check out Hollywood sometime, and see how many failed projects there are compared to the successful ones. Sturgeon's Law applies in full force to everyone; it's just that with open source, all the dirty laundry is out there for everyone to see. Proprietary companies usually sweep failures under the rug and the public is none the wiser.
Unfortunately chances are that when you submit a bug, the person reviewing it isn't the person responsible for the bug. I find it to be a responsibility to fix bugs that I have created. If you can point one to me, then great you saved me some time finding it myself.
The real pain in my opinion is fixing the work of someone else. First of all, I didn't create the bug. Second and more importantly, I didn't create that piece of the software - I'm not familiar with it. If it's fairly complex then I must spend a lot of time adapting to their coding style, understanding how exactly they accomplish the task, identify where the bug comes in and THEN fix it. I'd feel better re-writing the whole piece but that isn't progress, I'll maybe save a few KB of source but I'm re-inventing that wheel.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
+1, camel cock.
Or 'emerge --newuse world' if you just want to recompile the programs affected by the change in use flags.
It's much nicer to report bugs to folks who genuinely want to receive the reports and want their packages to work.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I agree. If you use Ubuntu, it is also quite unnecessary. The Ubuntu Update Manager GUIfies this - it pops up to ask you if you would like to upgrade. If you don't want to, it doesn't nag, but presents the option if you would like to update at a later time.
You have no GUI? Well, CLI users are SOL: They need to replace keywords in sources.list.
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
Ha! I love it when people copy their comments from this site!
Grand archive of fools and their foolish comments on Gentoo...
I'm curious why you chose Debian over Ubuntu. The reason I ask, is that I was thinking of switching from Debian to Ubuntu, but if you had a bad experience with it, then I won't bother. :)
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I agree, ~x86 breaks my build all the time. However, it's rarely Portage that is breaking. Nine times out of ten there is a compiler error that everyone else has picked up that breaks the build and forces the Portage team to roll back the version. I think it's hard to fault the distro when it's actually the developers who are breaking the code.
There have been many posts over what Gentoo's stated purpose is. When you read the link above regarding the comments on the mailing list (on LWN), you'll see that even the developers fight over its purpose. Personally, I think that is okay. I use Gentoo because it's highly customizable and I can get all the bells and whistles. The documentation is excellent and the chatroom and forums are really helpful. I say they stop worrying about what Gentoo's purpose and goals are and just keep doing what they're doing. I'm happy just the way it is (although I kind of preferred the old stage 1 build myself).
And another thing - if someone adds a feature to portage, it's not going to break or change the way I do things. I've never used the Graphical LiveCD and I probably never will. I think the freedom to add that should be included, just as I have the freedom to ignore it if I like. Very few things are forced on you by Gentoo, even Desktops/WM's like Gnome and KDE. It's all about choice, and Gentoo definitely personifies that more than other distros.
I know a guy who's maintained the same install of Gentoo on his laptop for over four years who has kept it up-to-date by using portage without a re-install. Talk about impressive for a Linux distribution.)
Steps to recreate this 'amazing' feat:
1) Install Debian
2) apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
3) Profit!
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Right on the money. The problem is that a lot of people get very religious over the issues, determined that the tinkering is "necessary" for a useful, efficient system (it's not, let's face it), and will tend to advocate Gentoo for every task, which it's neither designed nor particularly useful for.
The biggest problem with almost any given Linux distribution is its fans. The people who don't realise that just because they like something that it's not universally useful. I don't like recompiling things, or tinkering with USE flags and the like. The performance increases are, to me, negligable. The customisability of the system is not useful to me since I just want a working system in a short time, that works reasonably well. Gentoo is not the distribution for me — but that doesn't mean it can't be good for someone else. People get too absolutist over these things, arguing until they're blue in the face about irrelevant benefits.
...It's everything that gets too big without scaling.
Look at the Portage tree. Once upon a time, I'm sure bandwidth was at a premium and it made sense to just use rsync. Now, I'm guessing that rsync is slowing things down more at both ends, and ultimately costing more money, than the Debian way of doing things -- just split it into 10-20 small downloads, and use HTTP.
But that's a technical thing, and it's been worked on. Regenerating metadata takes much less time now, for one thing.
What bugs me is, in the early days, I could send a mail to something like gentoo@gentoo.org and get a response, even before I tried out the distro. Later, when I tried it out, just about any question in irc.freenode.net#gentoo would either get me an immediate answer, or someone willing to spend 10-20 minutes on my own problem.
Debian, on the other hand, was downright unhelpful, down to their IRC channel. RTFM all around.
Nowadays, there's Ubuntu, which is both extremely helpful with support and extremely easy to figure out even without support. I had a boss teach me Debian, so learning curve isn't a huge deal anymore. And maybe it's just that I'm asking tougher questions now, but I frequently will ask something in #gentoo and get absolutely no response, ever. Worse, I've submitted a few bug reports, got a couple of users saying "me too", but the bug still hasn't been assigned after a couple weeks of just sitting there.
I used to think OSS was more responsive than corporations, and it used to be true, but I'm guessing Apple will respond to my bug report before Gentoo does.
The community can also be downright hostile now. Usually it's nice to newbies, but I remember an incident where I reported a bug in documentation -- there was a mention of Reiser4 as alpha, untested, unstable, unreleased, or some other such nonsense. I was suggesting that the wording be changed so it's at least factually accurate -- Reiser4 has actually been released, even if Hans Reiser is the first to admit that until it's hammered on by thousands of users, it probably won't be stable enough for production servers. The person handling the bug kept saying "That's your opinion," and closing the bug. I think it got pretty personal, but even the majority of Slashdot seems to be able to distinguish between facts and opinions. Whether you think Vista is even Alpha quality now is irrelevant, it would be innacurate to call it anything other than Release Candidate, except in jest, or when making it clear that it's your opinion that it's Alpha, and MS actually calls it RC.
I think we need a truly community distro. I'm trying to remember who gave me this idea, it was over IRC, but we need a distro and a package management system that reflects the structure of the Internet.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If you change your flags, and you're rebuilding for a different architecture, then you really want to do an emerge -uDn world at the VERY least. I throw in a v and p for good measure to see what I'm doing.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
You're a douche.
What is Gentoo and what makes it different from other distros?
I think it is different because it uses portage.
They should factor it out and separate the portage effort from the Gentoo distro which includes forums, stage tarballs, ISOs, DVDs, LiveCDs and all sorts of derived projects.
For me, portage is not much more than a configuration option translater -- effectively implementing a common and standardized package configuration mechanism for all the packages in the portage tree. I don't see any use in tightly binding it to Gentoo Linux. It could also be used by all other distro manufacturers to build their binary packages.
christ almighty it was just a joke... maybe kind of a lame joke... but not flamebait.
jeez