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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?"
Err ... completely different colour high horse to look down on other from?
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
"This is the problem with OSS. Everyone wants to get famous for the next big breakthrough and nobody wants to maintain the shit."
Seriously. I submitted several UI bugs to the Xfce bugzilla site recently and none of them were addressed. People want to develop fun new features, but unfortunately that's not all that software is.
Really, I find that most people would rather complain about what they don't like than actually do anything to help fix it.
I find that most project owners would rather complain that other people don't fix things for them than actually do anything to maintain their own code.
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 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.
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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
you don't see Microsoft telling it's customers "You don't like explorer? Fix it yourself!"
No, Microsoft says, "You don't like explorer? Tough shit!" On rare occasions it's "You don't like explorer? Well I'm afraid it's far too integrated into Windows your Honour."
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
This thread explains why there will always be a place for proprietary software you must pay for. That's so someone can be paid to do uninteresting but necessary stuff.
Well, I'm not going to post anonymously. In fact, you're more than welcome to see exactly what I think. I know for a fact that this is going to make me a few enemies and probably piss off quite a few developers. Quite frankly, I agree with the poster here on many things, but definitely not on all of them. Gentoo really needs a few things to remain a top distribution. For one, we absolutely must stop doing this experimental crap and start focusing on improving and fixing what we already have in the tree. We need to focus on improving the quality of the distribution more than adding new "features" that do nothing more than make things easier on the lazy and the incompetent. There are simply too many Gentoo developers moving in too many directions. We have no focus. We have no direction. Worse yet, if we had one, we have no way of enforcing that we actually move towards it. Gentoo needs a good house-cleaning to remove some of the "problem children" and get us back to, oh, I don't know, maintaining packages and fixing bugs. Sure, that's not very glamorous, but we *are* a community-based Linux distribution. Perhaps we should get back to actually working on that, instead of trying to come up with new projects which sap resources from other places.
It is my personal opinion that the Gentoo developer community is too large and too diverse to properly work towards any real common goals. We have also diverged too far into essentially two camps, those that want the new whiz-bang features and want them now, and those that want a good, stable, reliable, and flexible system that is capable of meeting the demands put upon it. I definitely fall into the second category. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for experimental things, but they should be done outside of the scope of the main project and brought into the project once they've been proven.
I tend to believe that Gentoo needs more internal structure and needs more *well-designed* process to get things done. I don't think that red tape is the answer, but there has to be something done to solve this current anarchy. General development in the business world follows many stages, from initial design, through development, testing, QA, then deployment. In too many places, Gentoo developers are completely skipping the design and jumping straight into development. What this gives the world is a poorly designed product that is extremely hard to maintain and keep the quality up on over time. Beyond that, general testing an QA is being skipped in far too many places, or being done "after the fact" once something is in the wild.
I hope that the election of a new Gentoo council will bring about change to make Gentoo for the better, but truly fear that unless we start taking a hardline position on many of these new projects that we will fade into oblivion under the weight of our own garbage.
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?