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

What's the difference?

[PhrostyMcByte]

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?

Yes, but look who's back......

[mickwd]

Daniel Robbins becomes a Gentoo Developer again.

Welcome back.

Re:Yes, but look who's back......

[On Lawn]

Way cool.

He's always been a person who does something first, and then talks about it later. I remember way back in the Stampede days, it was all just an idea that code could be compiled to run faster. And the Stampede team just did it.

But what really made Gentoo nice was when DRobbins took from BSD the ability to turn on and off features for the whole system from the bottom up. Having watched Turbo Fredriksson chaff on Debian's package scheme (although I don't think it felt as painful to him as it looked to me) Gentoo was a welcome suprise.

But I have to say, I finally understand what the poster might be getting at. The problem is not Gentoo as much as it is a general problem that Gentoo has not solved for itself. And that is managers vs doers. The person linked as a complainer wants more management, and the people in the LWN article want more doing. Management is overhead if all you do with it is make decisions. Management streamlines and makes the doers' job easier when done right.

I remember the golden days of slashdot ended for me when I realized that it was filled with managers not doers. Everyone was giving opinions on what everyone else should do, from software development to technical development. I suppose it is only natural, slashdot is a place to talk and think. So that is who it attracts.

So it is funny to me that this debate that seems to have come full circle, and probably will continue to hound projects like Gentoo. The person who posted the controversy seems to have completely missed the topic, and his summary shows it. But I hope all the best for Gentoo. I'm sure they'll figure it out with a few hard knocks here and there. I don't think Gentoo will go anywhere, unless a better source distro comes along. And if so, I have no problem with that.

Yes, Gentoo is a mess

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Yes, Gentoo is a mess

[Penguin Follower]

I have been using Gentoo for quite awhile and I don't have any gripes. Someone has to be doing something (maintaining packages) or I wouldn't have to emerge --sync and emerge -uD world every few days.

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!).

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.)

Re:Sunrise disaster

[paskie]

And what exactly is disastrous about it? According to the timeline it is alive and nothing hints about any disasters...

Squash key bugs first!

[starseeker]

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 ;-)

Re:They're in for a world of hurt

[cloricus]

Only the first thirty posts and there are disgusting posts from pissed off users... I hate to be the one to say it - though having to read through several sets of Debian issues and their comments on /. and seeing a lot of Gentoo users flaming I think I should - maybe Gentoo should get its own house in order before it attacks other distros?

Now for the constructive part of this post. Why is this even a problem? Seriously, sit down and talk through the issue, it's not that hard. They don't want to do what you want and you don't want them to do what they want...I've heard of this one before I think it's called life? Gentoo while a bit off some times is a damn good project and one of the shining stars for the Linux communities...and you keep the windows newb gamers off the rest of our backs so for that you get extra brownie points. So for the sake of every one else just talk it through instead of fighting...

Gentoo works fine for me

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Gentoo works fine for me

[Progman3K]

Totaly with you on this.

I've been running Gentoo for about 3 years. Before I was running Windows.

Gentoo is so much more stable, responsive, easy to maintain and has the best forums I've ever seen.

Like you, the only time(s) I've ever had problems on the machines I have installed it on was always due to hardware or running out of disk space! :-)

It is time to send them some money.

Re: No, bad

[Black Parrot]

> 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

Yes, for the past year or so I've been noticing more broken dependencies. Really annoying was a couple of *mm packages that got into an upgrade-downgrade cycle. Every time you did -uD world they'd want to switch to whatever they were before the last time.

That was a glaring annoyance, but hardly the only one. I've been working on "clean" install this week, and it hasn't been very clean at all. I've found both broken dependencies and documentation that tells you to do the wrong thing. I'm starting to sympathize with Joe Barr after all...

Re:This is how Free Software dies.

[Stalyn]

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).

It should be noted that the majority of people working for RedHat/Novell/Intel on OSS projects were OSS developers first and then did good work which got them noticed by the corporate structure. They were then hired to do what they were already doing, of course now they have managers to deal with.

Also I think it's a little preemptive to conclude OSS has failed just because some Gentoo devs got into a cock-size contest. It happens in the corporate world too, but behind closed doors.

Re:No, bad

[Nimey]

How about you shut the fuck up and just use a different distro? Nobody's holding a gun to your head to force you to use Gentoo or anything else.

I'm torn between thinking you're a whiner or that you're a troll.

Re:There are alternatives to Gentoo

[dogwarrior]

Here's another satisfied SourceMage user. :)

My first source based Linux installation was SourceMage, which I decided to try after the Gentoo 2006.0 installer failed to accept the keymap I told it to use. I was quite happy with SourceMage but I wanted to try Gentoo because it's more popular. So, when the Gentoo 2006.1 installer came out, I decided to give it a go. This time it accepted my keymap and I got Gentoo successfully installed. Still, I found Gentoo installation a real PITA when compared to SourceMage's straightforward installer.

Then I read Gentoo documentation and found out that I needed to consult some man page in order to set USE flags. This brought me dark memories from the time when I fought with FreeBSD's Ports system. And, sure enough, I learned that Gentoo's Portage was inspired by FreeBSD's Ports. I never had to edit any config files to set dependencies in SourceMage. SourceMage just asks which dependencies I want before installing packages and then it remembers my selections.

At this point I started to realize what a fool I had been in giving up SourceMage just because Gentoo is more popular. I had been very happy with SourceMage and now I began to see how much simpler it is to set up a SourceMage system than a Gentoo system. Why should I continue to fight with Gentoo when SourceMage wanted to make things easier for me?

With these thoughts I decided to say goodbye to Gentoo and reinstalled SourceMage. And I don't think I'll give Gentoo another try as long as SourceMage is still around. SourceMage is just more intuitive and less of a hassle than Gentoo.

These experiences make me wonder why Gentoo is so popular? Is it just because people don't know about the alternatives? Or is it because everyone knows that Gentoo is the most popular source distro and people automatically assume that the most popular must always be better than the less popular alternatives?

I give up..

[B5_geek]

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.

Re:No, bad

[Wylfing]

As a sibling post points out, this is totally false. I have been involved in several free projects, and at one time was the lead maintainer of one. It is true that sometimes you don't feel like bug-fixing. But sometimes you do feel like it, and it is pretty rewarding to send out a new release with no (or few) new features but a hundred bug fixes. It's just that, since it's my time, gratis, I feel like I should get to spend it how I want to.

And, frankly, who gives a rip about "beating" proprietary software? Not me.

Re:Well, guys, I have a solution.

[Anonymous Coward]

did you do a revdep-rebuild? It's not really Gentoo's fault if after you recompile libraries their dependencies start to fail.

WHY I DON'T USE GENTOO -- reason number #99813

I've reported problems to Gentoo

[Slashdot Parent]

I've reported gentoo bugs using their bug system. Nothing ever gets fixed, so I stopped reporting and came up with my own fix.

It's much nicer to report bugs to folks who genuinely want to receive the reports and want their packages to work.