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?"

Comments

Re:No, bad

[tomstdenis]

That, or ... they could TEST THE FUCKING UPDATES.

I don't have the time to rebuild kernels and reboot all the time. Especially since this is a MULTI-USER box with a file share on it. I need it to be up and working. I really don't see how you can screw up a working USB driver. I mean EHCI still works but UHCI just gives "bad address" errors when probing the USB device [it detects that I plugged it in, just can't get past the probe stage].

You know, real companies who make proprietary software have boxes for testing. This is what Linux will need if they want to grow beyond a neato hobby. I mean hell, if I can buy spare boxes for processor testing surely there has to be enough people in the Linux project to buy boxes just to test the mobo/hardware.

Tom

Re:No, bad

[tomstdenis]

my "spare boxes" are DIFFERENT PLATFORMS, one is a P4 32-bit, another is a Core2 64-bit and the other is a $7000 Opteron 2-way box.

I'm not buying spare IDENTICAL boxes just because Kernel developers are too immature to address the problem properly. I mean how do you get the right to brag "Oh, I'm a Kernel developer, see my code-fu muscles" when you can't invest the money to actually develop seriously?

You think MSFT has only one type of workstation in their QA labs? Very doubtful. Everyone is so quick to mock MSFT but then when the real punches come out they get all super defensive...

I bought my boxes because I implement crypto software and I take performance studies seriously. I even own various ARM and PPC kits to test on. These things aren't free. They cost money to buy and time to setup and use. But I do it because I take my projects seriously.

Tom

Re:Yes, Gentoo is a mess

[agaffney]

Except that as another user noted above, there's a problem with the base install where PAM and shadow libraries conflict with each other (obviously there are packates from the stage tarball that depend on each?) and it was a problem in the 2006.0 release. Something like that should have been fixed for the 2006.1 release. I had a lot of "fun" getting around that problem (and a lot of wasted time!).

There was no "conflict". At some point in the past, pam-login had been broken out from shadow, and then it was decided it should be put back in. There was a blocker put in the newer version of shadow (with pam-login rolled back in) so you wouldn't have pam-login and shadow providing the same files at the same time. Blockers are a normal part of using Portage. This "fun" you speak of was simple to get around:

emerge -B shadow && emerge -C pam-login && emerge -1k shadow

This was covered on the mailing lists, GWN, and forums. Don't blame Gentoo because you can't use the tools or read.

I mean basically "out of the box", you've just finished the install and you reboot into your new gentoo system only to find a PITA of a problem the minute you go to install a package or set of packages that depends on Pam or shadow. I still have the 2005.whatever release still running on my main linux box because of this (I was smart and tried 2006.x on a different system first.)

You mean you've never updated the box since you installed over a year ago? If you've updated world recently, congrats, you're running a 2006.x release on that box.

Re:Yes, Gentoo is a mess

[agaffney]

Generally, I prefer to fix it myself if I can.

I figured this out on my own, but that's because I know how to use portage and what a blocker is.