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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?"
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.)
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.
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
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...
I ate your fish.
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.
Um.... OSS Sucks, and yet you still use it? Um.... Look. You're using the most user-unfriendly chunk of OSS there is. You're complaining it's user-unfriendly. I've installed both Ubuntu and the old Mandrake, I've done it for myself and non-techies, it was easy, I'm actually pretty happy overall. I'm not a demon-monster-coder. I can code enough to do it for a living.
Your continual 'OSS Sucks' comments are mildly offensive, seeing as you're judging an entire community based upon your experience with a small piece of it. They show you personally lack in certain areas of consideration.
OSS doesn't have any real problems, it's individuals within the system. The system / movement / whatever you want to call it itself mutates all the time. It's a software project that has lasted and lived in the same area for over ten or fifteen years, and managed to keep up with modern technology. There aren't a whole lot of codebases like that out there.
I'm sorry you think OSS sucks as a whole. But I don't agree and flaming the crap out of all the people that don't is just trolling.
My little site.
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.
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?
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)
Seriously, have you even read the other posts that you've written?
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
Portage stores package information in a directory tree updated via rsync, which overwrites local modifications. An overlay is a separate directory maintained by the administrator. This capability has been used to kludge a third-party repository system, since Portage lacks direct support.
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