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Is Gentoo in crisis?
TheCoop1984 writes "A recent article on distrowatch, and an extended thread on the gentoo forums, have pointed out that gentoo is not what it used to be. Daniel Robbins came back and went again after only a few days, developer turnover is as high as ever, personal attacks on the mailing lists are common, and people are generally not happy about the current state of affairs. Is gentoo rotting from the inside, and can anything be done about it?"
Honestly... It's just a teenage tantrum. Just ground them for a while, that should do it.
Waits for audience applause... not a sausage.
Flametroll...
I do, when I did my rounds trying various Linux distros, it had the fewest dependancy-hell type errors. I found it the least difficult to get working as I needed it, and to keep it working.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
The post linked to is much more amusing with context.
When people with strong personalities leave an organization it becomes more attractive for people that would rather not deal with them. I expect Gentoo will see a trickle in of new developers.
I hope gentoo doesn't pass away as it's a clever idea and a good system but really who was it appealing to? Even as a geek is wasn't really interested in compiling my own packages because there is so little to be gained by it. Probably the best solution is to have a system where you can compile your own easily when you want to but generally take the precompiled offering - basically what Debian does. The performance that Gentoo claimed never really appeared AFAIK and I think that would be the only reason for the system.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
They can't leave! If they do, I will have read the 45 page install manual for nothing!
Netcraft may or may not confirm it, since it rarely can tell Linux versions or distros apart anyway.
For me the point of Gentoo was the USE flags, few programs had plugin support, even fewer had runtime cpu detection. Nowadays it's much better, even oldschool programs like mplayer can be used without recompiling. For the past two years I have been using Ubuntu on the desktop and the only program I compile by hand is hot-babe (most people can live without it). I've compiled the kernel hundreds of times in my days, but not for a couple of years now. Gentoo just isn't worth it for me anymore, it was in the past. The point is I don't lose anything anymore by going with a prepackaged distro.
If Gentoo is in trouble because of petty squabbling, that's truly unfortunate. If, on the other hand, it's in trouble because it's no longer useful to its core constituency, then perhaps it's better that the project is in decline. Either a major shakeup will occur or it will die a natural death. So which is it?
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
When drobbins left the first time, the distro headed toward the toilet and this situation does not improve things.
The Portage tree continues to have broken ebuilds in stable because of changes to the scripts. This puts the lie to the entire notion of 'stable'. Constant changes to syntax in scripts are also occurring. I don't see a damned good reason why 'emerge sync' is now deprecated, for instance. It worked fine for years before. What's the problem now?
If I have to hack theoretically stable ebuilds to get them to compile, exactly why aren't I just using LFS?
It all stinks of a lot of juvenile e-penis crap. This kind of thing just did not happen when drobbins was running Gentoo. The structure he put in place makes it just like Debian with the politics but with less concern for quality. The distro is doomed because i'm on the hairtrigger of moving all my boxes off of it after almost 5 years, which makes me think many people have done so already, and will do so.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
council meeting sumary, taken from gentoo-dev
s /20070208-summary.txt
s /20070308.txt
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-log
full log
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-log
for me, gentoo is still more healthy than any other platform ever
There you are, staring at me again.
It seems to me that a project like this has to be driven by a "Big Idea".
The big idea doesn't have to be a valid one -- although it helps. What it has to do is attract and retain contributors. It has to keep them working together despite their differences. Differences between people who are working toward the same goal can be a good thing, if their commitment is strong enough that they eventually try to to see the other side. If not, then they end up standing in the way of progress until they decide to leave.
Each successful distro has a big idea.
Fedora: bring the most up to date technology to Linux, both for users and others who want to make specialized distros.
Debian: create the freest possible operating system.
Ubuntu: promote a free operating system like Debian, but with more frequent releases so that users have the benefits of newer technology.
Slack: place the highest value on design simplicity; assume the user knows what he is doing and stay out of his way.
CENTOS: provide a completely free operating system that will also allow any user to run enterprise software (e.g. Oracle) without paying any unnecessary license fees.
Knoppix: make it possible for everybody to try a free operating system without the hassles or issues of a hard disk installation.
and so forth. Each of these ideas not only has merit, it has contributor appeal.
The big idea of Gentoo is to create a distribution in which components are distributed in source code form only, and compiled by the user. The idea has both its merits and problems. But the real question is whether it has enough appeal to motivate people to overcome their normal differences. Time will tell, but I have my doubts.
For one thing, the Gentoo goal is achievable and has been achieved. In many other distros, the big idea is like the horizon; it keeps receding as you move towards it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That's why most people use gentoo. It looks good, ostensibly. People never stop to consider the long-term. Consider this: A timeline of 365 days of gentoo.
Days 1-3, install.
Day */3 - Recompile $pkg for security vulnerability or new version. Re-edit this pkg's config file because options have changed. Some renamed, some deprecated, some added, some removed. Re-attempt to get your server back into the state it was two weeks ago without having to revert to a vulnerable package.
Day 365 - suicide.
Now, compare this to debian:
Minutes 1-10, install.
Days */10, apt-get upgrade (assuming a cron of apt-get update).
Day 365? At the beach, not even thinking about your servers.
Repeat after me: Gentoo is not a server OS.
That should be more correctly Linux/Debian to distinguish is from HURD/Debian.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Currently I still use it myself, since I can handle most of the problems myself and has the flexibility I like. But I stopped installing it for friends and relatives. And I strongly discourage its use in my company. It is just too unstable. It is fine if you are a geek (I am) and have too much time (I don't). For my friends it is kubuntu now.
Gentoo was and somewhat is great, but there hardly is a world update anymore, which goes smoothly. Sometimes things even break silently, so you cannot even be sure when something broke. Constantly the need to learn new configuration syntaxes because the old configuration stops working after an update is very tiring. Uprade/downgrade ping-pong also stops being funny quickly. I could complain because of seemingly egomaniacal decisions of the maintainers to remove widely used packages like xmms, but this would not be fair. If they have not enough manpower to maintain those packages, better remove them, but it still stings to be forced to search for alternatives.
I would not say there is no quality control in the Gentoo development, if I find 10 bugs, there might have been 100 others, which had been caught before release, but it simply isn't enough. I think it is fair to say that the Gentoo project has outgrown the current staff. They simply cannot handle it adequately anymore.
If anyone from the Gentoo staff should read this lines: It really isn't meant as an insult. You did great, but reached a point where your current methods are not sufficient anymore.
You know, I've read several articles online in the last few months which suggest serious problems with Gentoo. But I think it's important to consider the fact that, from my personal perspective and in my own experience, I have had less issues in the last 6 months with Gentoo (except for a hardware failure on one of my main hard drive), than I have had in all the time I've used Gentoo. My system right now is also running more unstable packages than I've ever run, and this is all in amd64.
I admit that I'd stick with Gentoo even if, from my perspective as a user, it was going through a hard time, but on my (KDE desktop) system, which is the main system I use for just about everything, if I didn't read these articles, I would have no idea that anything was going wrong.
I have spent less time maintaining, fixing, or otherwise bringing my system up to date in the last few months than I have in years.
As for interpersonal politics, lack of diplomacy, and immoderate language, I don't think that's anything unique to Gentoo. It may well be that there are some cultural issues which need addressing - not for me to say - and perhaps the departure of key developers may, in the future, affect the user's experience, but for me, this has not yet been the case.
I like Gentoo a lot - in fact, I wound up running it sort of by mistake. As a newcomer to Linux, I'd read (in late 2001) that the Gentoo install was some kind of baptism of fire. I had problems understanding some of the fundamentals of how Linux systems are set up and at the time my Mandrake install was not helping me learn. I installed Gentoo as a lark, with the idea that I might learn some things about Linux that I could apply to Mandrake (which I was running because everyone said, at the time, that it was a great distribution for beginners).
Having gotten it installed on the first try, without any problems whatsoever, I ran it for a little while. Then I fell in love with portage which was - at the time - more reliable than Mandrake's package manager. After a few weeks, I couldn't find a reason to go back to Mandrake. This was just a few months in, after years of being a Windows user (which is why I also take issue with the popular assertion that Gentoo isn't for beginners, because it was ideal for me).
In the time since, I've tried several distributions and use Debian on my router and my file server, because they're old, crotchety machines that I was too lazy to install Gentoo on. But I've yet to find anything which so closely matches my expectation of how my system should work, than Gentoo. Which is why I'd stick with it (that and 5 years of momentum, of course).
For me, Gentoo is about ease of use, and specifically *not* having to spend a lot of time keeping my system up to date. In no way am I suggesting that the assertions of others that "Gentoo is too much work" are invalid, but they certainly have nothing to do with my experience, or that of many other Gentoo users. As for compiling software (for instance), this is a process I run, background, and forget about. Every few months, something a little more involved might require an hour or so of my attention (a major GCC upgrade, for instance) but overall, maintaining my system is simply not a time sink, at all.
And no, I'm not a developer. A computer hobbyist and fan of computers, but hardly some kind of guru. There may be good reasons not to use Gentoo, but I'd hate for anyone to think that these political spats somehow define the distribution or have much to do with the user's experience.
At least, it doesn't, so far, have anything to do with *me*. I still recommend Gentoo wholeheartedly. I have a lot of affection for it. I can and have used other distributions and I could learn to live with just about any distribution if I had to, but I doubt it would be the complete pleasure that Gentoo has been. I don't have hatred for any of the distributions I've tried out (Debian, OpenSuSE, Mandrake, Fedora, Slackware, Kubuntu, and FreeBSD as well), bu
emerge --rsync
emerge --update world
emerge --clean world
(IANAL)
I run Gentoo on five different systems, including a laptop and an Alpha. For me one of the big advantages is that it doesn't fill up with dozens of unwanted libraries. Let me explain: In an RPM based distribution (I have used Mandrake and SuSE) when one installs an application, it will often bring in a host of other dependent RPMs. That's just fine, and Gentoo does something similar, but what happens when you decide that you don't want the application any longer? I often install something to try it out and then decide that it doesn't do what I want. You can remove the application itself, but what about all those libxxxxx.rpm packages which it depended on. I can remove them if I can remember which ones they were, but otherwise they just hang around getting in the way.
"Disks are cheap you Bozo!" Yes, I know, but I keep my systems up to date and unwanted libraries mean unwanted security updates. With Gentoo, this problem is entirely solved with the 'emerge --depclean' command. When I emerge an application its name is added to the world file (/var/lib/portage/world) but not the names of it's dependencies. So, emerge --depclean simply looks for packages which which are not in world (or the base system list) and aren't depended on by any installed packages.
Related points: The wonder of USE flags means that many libraries never get installed at all because I can tell the application that I am not interested in that functionality. My general point also applies to cases where one upgrades an application and the new version no longer depends on a particular library.
If there are RPM (or apt) based distributions which have a similar scheme then I would love to know about it. Mandrake has (or at least used to have) a script called something like 'urpmi_rpm-find-leaves' which gave a list of RPMs which were not depended upon. By filtering the output through 'grep lib' one could get part of the way there, but it would still leave quite a few RPMs to locate by hand.
For me, as a Computer Scientist, it's all about the packages. I _love_ the bleeding edge and the obscure. No other distro out there offers the depth and breadth of packages that Gentoo does. Using anything else is just downright painful as I end up compiling a lot of my own programs _anyway_ by hand (and not managed).
I originally switched to Gentoo because I had given up on using Slackware's package system and was keeping a large library of software current by hand.... Gentoo scratched my itch perfectly.
I really do hope it doesn't die from the inside. There are still a lot of people doing a lot of good work... and a _lot_ of people still benefiting from it. The way I see it, these type of squabbles are just a by product of becoming popular. As your dev team grows you're inevitably going to have personality conflicts... you just hope that over time you find a way to work them out and it doesn't bring the project down in the mean time.
Friedmud
Releases are still on track. bugs are being fixed. packages are being maintained. I just switched to Gentoo a couple months ago at home, on my notebook, and at work. All is well from the end user perspective. :)
This blog said a lot I agree with. The Gentoo-relevant part:
As for me, I once spent four days back in 2002 trying to install Gentoo on a laptop -- never did get X to work. Once I gave up, I had RedHat 7.3 installed in under three hours. I'm not saying Gentoo is a bad distro, but after that experience, I've had serious reservations about trying it again.
Just learn how to set CFLAGS when you build a Debian package and quit wasting time with Yet Another Distro.
Right now there are 220,000 files, some ~100 bytes and others ~0-4k. Just to support portage. Space-age filesystems or not that's a lot of tiny files to be scattered around and updated piecemeal. What happens is that gentoo starts taking more and more time to do syncs and searches, not to mention everything else slowing down.
.zip file. In a zip each file is compressed individually, so you could still do rsync diffs. There's an index at the end so you can do really quick lookups (bypassing the whole slow path of inode / namei). The fs can do read-ahead and caching much better on a single file, and it won't have to do a seek for every file.
A good solution would be to put portage into a
This is the kind of real, fundamental problem that gentoo should be solving. Gentoo should be the lightest distro, not a huge sprawling mess.
First let me start by saying that I love Gentoo and have been using it for over 5 years now.
I've submitted hundreds of bugs and fixes, been part of sunrise overlay, and even went all the way down the road to becoming a official developer. (Took the quiz, worked for a few months with other devs)
The biggest problem I ran into was the extremely bad attitudes of existing developers. Several of the herds are filled with out right insulting egotistical children. If you suggest something other than what they like, you are attacked and not allowed into their "clicks." This is compounded by the fact that most of them are high school and college age kids who don't have any maturity.
And it's not just one herd or area either. I've tried to plug in and help with many of them. Each time making a suggestion they turn to insults and ignore different ideas. After literately months of dealing with this I just stopped trying. And I'm not the only one either.
It is very sad to see things like this when Gentoo itself is such a fantastic idea.
I've run Gentoo for about 3 years, give or take. Despite comments that the performance gains of compiling from source aren't worth it, try having a PIII-733 Laptop with 256Mb of RAM (hard limit on that machine) that you want to actually USE as a Linux box. Painful with anything except a well optimized Gentoo installation. I ran that for over a year before I took a trip with that rock-solid little laptop. It was a pleasure to use every day of my trip... the laptop was tiny and therefore was easy to throw in my backpack (I was motorcycling across the UK) when traveling, was light and simple. With Fedora the poor beastie just crawled... and Ubuntu I just couldn't get working reliably on that hardware (ironic, I know!)
:)
I've still got that little laptop, and periodically boot her up to do an "emerge --sync; emerge -u world", maybe compile a new kernel. I don't use it as a daily laptop any more since I bought a Mac last year... but it's still a rock solid little machine that I might take with me this year when I repeat my trip in October.
But old hardware isn't just what Gentoo is good at. I use it frequently; in virtual environments. The host... well that can be Windows, Linux... or ESX... take your pick. However, when I need a slick, fast booting and "built to order" Linux box as a guest then there's nothing better than a Gentoo installation that boots the kernel, the VMWare Tools and then the application the guest is hosting! Fast boot, application isolation and simple package management (I usually set up a centralized Portage tree on the host machine). Believe me, the ability to reboot your web server in less than 10 seconds makes management sit up and take notice, especially when the other groups are using IIS boxes that take five minutes to come back from a hard failure.
But Gentoo isn't for everyone, and isn't for every implementation. I wouldn't call it "granny-friendly", and I would only use in a production environment where isolation is possible and rollback is simple (like in my aforementioned virtual environment... snapshots are a thing of beauty). Having said that, I recently built out a new home server and it got Gentoo almost by default. I thought about Fedora... but the flexibility of Gentoo really got to the geek in me
Like most, I certainly understand the many reasons folks graviate towards Gentoo. But, from my experience, it is so damned unstable. I tried to give it a go one more time earlier this year. Because of package masking, even installing kdebase seemed/was impossible. (Both in x86 and ~x86).I assume this sort of thing is more common than a temporary problem. So my question is: Why use Gentoo over FreeBSD?? Yes, I know there is more comprehensive driver support in Linux, but the FreeBSD ports system never fails me. Aside from the USE flags, I also feel like I have enough control with /etc/make.conf in FreeBSD as in Gentoo.
Again, this isn't a troll, but...why use Gentoo over FreeBSD???
I don't see Gentoo failing any time soon due to the distro's that are being based on Gentoo. I see fewer and fewer people using "pure" Gentoo in the future, but more people using distro's based on Gentoo. Face it, Stage 1 Gentoo is hard to set up. Why bother when you can run something like Sabayon or Vida that gives you all the benefits of Gentoo with a much easier installer, provided you set up your use flags recompile after install (or not... your call). Just like few people actually run "true" Debian, many people run Debian based distro's such as Ubuntu, Linspire and so on.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Ever heard of glsa-check, ? Did you ever consider that with gentoo you can roll your own updates from upstream and test them without fear of major breakage instead of waiting for a distro-supplied .deb to finally come out three days after the vuln is made public? Do you claim that distro-provided defaults are sufficient configuration for your servers or that somehow debian automagically removes the need to edit config files when changes in their format/content appear once in a while and you have (gasp) new options to consider?
No? Ok, then please take your ubuntu superiority myths (I don't believe for a second that you're running vanilla debian) and stuff'em where the sun don't shine. Why the heck were you doing updating a production server just to get a new version on day three after deployment anyway?
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
You do unattended package upgrades without testing on a server? Do you also want to be on the beach on day 365, unemployed?
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
StickyBunSmear...
Quite funny that almost everytime when "Gentoo" is the topic, all the talks and comments evolve around (pseudo-)speed, source-distribution and things like that.
The article is about internal problems, and not about how one's computer runs absolutely flawlessly, or not.
My Blog: "sum it up - News, emotions and science"
Compiling distros is for distro maintainers and people who can't find a distro for what they need. Gentoo's userbase should be much smaller than it is in light of that.
Conclusion: There are a lot of idiots using Gentoo
After KDE and Xorg has been compiled from Stage 1 so the developer can answer on the allegations.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Reason #1 is sheer transparency. I can do an ebuild in my sleep, and it certainly makes it a lot easier to dig around when something's wrong. Whether it's because of the binary nature, or because I simply don't know how to use it, I'm just not as proficient with hacking apt stuff.
Reason #2 is g-cpan, and things like it. Ubuntu has to manually go and re-package CPAN libs, Gentoo can automagically generate them for things which don't require special care. In general, Gentoo's philosophy of a package being an ebuild being a shell script makes it a lot easier to use other packaging systems. Did the bastards only provide an RPM? Have your ebuild download the original RPM, unpack it using tools like rpm2targz or even rpm itself, and install it as a Gentoo package. Again, this may be my own lack of understanding, but it seems like this kind of thing is tricker -- both legally and technologically -- with a system like apt.
Reason #3 is laziness. It's already on my desktop and server, and so far, it's been one steady problem after another, but never something that, by itself, takes longer than switching to Ubuntu.
However, I do set up all my new systems as Ubuntu or another debian-derived distro. The main points of Gentoo beyond that are arch-specific compiletime optimizations and USE flags. The machines I really want to perform well are amd64, and that's at the point where you lose pretty much nothing by compiling for generic x86_64 rather than athlon64 -- in fact, I think it's exactly equivalent with the current gcc. For awhile, I was using -O3, then I used -Os because I thought it made stuff faster, then I realized it wasn't making a noticeable difference, and even if it was, hardware is optimized for Windows and bloaty crap, so CPU caches are getting bigger all the time. -O2 seemed the sane compromise -- but most things compile with that anyway, and most of the other optimizations I wanted to try both break things when applied globally and are enabled by things for which they would make a difference anyway (like mplayer).
Compiling your own kernel probably used to give a significant performance boost, and possibly still does if you know what you're doing, but it's just a huge amount of time to spend running through the config dialogs. But even if I wanted to, Ubuntu makes it easier anyway -- make-kpkg is nice.
As for USE flags, they still can control useful stuff -- for instance, whether or not something compiles with an optional GUI. However, unless you really need to save every last bit of disk space, this means nothing. And even if you do, binary distros are able to slice things up a lot finer than source ones have been able to do in the past -- it used to be that installing one little gtk app required compiling a whole X server and all the X libs, whereas on Ubuntu, it installs maybe a meg or two worth of the base X libs (plus gtk, which isn't big either). In fact, one of the biggest uses of USE flags lately has been to deliberately disable functionality you won't be using, just to make stuff compile faster -- for example, if you specify your soundcard, alsa-driver won't compile every single soundcard ever made.
But that's to make livable a situation where the granularity of your package system is limited by what you can compile on its own, and typically, you'll end up downloading the full sources even if you only need to compile 10%, and only actually need 10% of the result of that. Which makes their old "Larry the Cow" slogan sadly obsolete -- with Gentoo, you end up compiling and installing much more than you need, in order to, say, not compile gtk support unless you need it -- and then have gtk compile and install the first time you actually do get a gtk-only app.
And Ubuntu does a better job of this, anyway. Plugins are a great example -- on Gentoo, you might compile xmms with flac support, or flac with xmms support. On Ubuntu, you just install xmms-flac or something -- one package that's just the flac plugin for xmms. I don't use xmms anymore, but there you go -- if
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
No, I do unattended package updates on my personal machine.
(IANAL)
it's been over three days and i cannot post to their forums until they send me the conformation. I'd go with Sabayon, since it's 100% gentoo compatible.
Wow, you really have your head up your ass, don't you?
.deb to finally come out three days after the vuln is made public?
Ever heard of glsa-check,
I've heard of glsa-check, even used it a time or two. All it does is tell you which pkgs you have installed which have disclosed sec. vulnerabilities. BFD.
Did you ever consider that with gentoo you can roll your own updates from upstream and test them without fear of major breakage
Oh, you mean like what debian/ubuntu pkg maintainers do for you? You know, following the debian guidelines thing?
waiting for a distro-supplied
What the hell are you on? You have to do the same thing. Wait for new versions in portage. What if the vuln is in v2 of the app and the sec. vuln. pushed the upstream to just release v3 which addresses the issue? Then you have all sorts of things to account for. New pkg version, probably different behaviour, etc. Configs? All changed. Binaries? Changed. Layout? Changed. What does debian do? Backports the fix to YOUR version. No config changes, no behaviour changes, just "fixed".
Do you claim that distro-provided defaults are sufficient configuration for your servers or that somehow debian automagically removes the need to edit config files when changes in their format/content appear once in a while and you have (gasp) new options to consider?
No, it doesn't remove the need. But you only need to do it once, unlike gentoo where you have a different version than you did 2 weeks ago, which means things have *changed*. *Changed* things require time, maintenance, testing and downtime. Config files normally (99.9% of the time) don't change in a stable release. Go ahead, read the debian policy.
No? Ok, then please take your ubuntu superiority myths (I don't believe for a second that you're running vanilla debian) and stuff'em where the sun don't shine.
Of course you don't agree, you couldn't possibly see someone running debian, right? I mean, those hundreds of thousands of installs of debian are just made up right? No one runs debian. It's not like sarge or even woody could possibly serve the function of say, a mail server, samba server, ldap server, web server, db server, etc.
Why the heck were you doing updating a production server just to get a new version on day three after deployment anyway?
Um, well, see, updating production servers is something system administrators do. It's part of their job. I don't expect you to understand, because you've clearly demonstrated that you're nothing more than someone who read a book on system administration once.
That's actually one of my bigger gripes about Gentoo -- in fact, I submitted a bug about documentation, which people refused to fix or understand.
I can't find it now, and I suspect the bug report is gone.
Basically, their installation instructions -- or some similar documentation -- mentioned Reiser4 and warned that it was unstable, beta stuff, or something like that. I pointed out that it may be unstable (and they could say that), but it was obviously, factually wrong to claim it was beta, as the code has been released as a final version. This went back and forth for awhile, with the guy handling the bug report continually insisting that he would not accept it as stable, and refusing to budge at all.
So, maybe it's good documentation, I don't really know anymore. But it's kind of ruined when you get that kind of ego in the way -- even when it's just the documentation. Who knows what other inaccuracies there are in there, simply because a developer doesn't want to even acknowledge an issue?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
And it's still dog slow and potentially dangerous. I'm fairly sure apt-get had its autoremove feature long before Gentoo had any kind of reverse deps -- and, indeed, aptitude will do this for you, in far less time than it takes to even get Gentoo to do an "emerge -uaDN world", much less a depclean.
USE flags? Well, it doesn't matter so much -- disk space is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, so it takes far less time to download and install the extra libs than it does to compile the app without those libs.
But even if you reject that, it's been my experience that Ubuntu is able to slice packages up finely enough that you can get that functionality anyway. In Gentoo, flac support for xmms is, I believe, an xmms flag of the flac ebuild. In Ubuntu, it's simply a separate, optional-but-recommended package that you can choose not to install -- and you don't have to recompile a package to remove functionality, you just remove one of these little packages.
There really are very few cases where USE flags actually matter, and in those cases (SMP vs not, for example), you'll get separate ebuilds.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Well I think gentoo got better over the years. Maybe the developers have to reorder and have some manifest they stick too when arguments/problems come up.
/etc/portage settings
What got better:
- modular X
- good integration of gentoo kernel and driver packages
-
- cleaned up USE flags
What got worse:
- dropping of packages for just political reasons e.g. xmms and the lie that's technical
- complexity
- useless dependencies (like not being able to install postfix and ssmtp at the same time)
Can be fixed - no panik.
When I first went to Linux, I decided to jump in the deep end and use Gentoo as my very first distro to install and learn on. And BOY did I learn a lot with Gentoo. No graphical installer, no nothing except for the install guide that was just a few pages printed off on a printer. Between that, the Gentoo IRC channel and the forums, I learned all kinds of things about setting up a Linux system...because you had to get in there and get your hands dirty. I basically learned what to change or tweak and WHY I was changing and tweaking it.
I've moved on to another system (OS X), but I'll always have a fond place in my heart for Gentoo...right next to my beloved Amiga.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Gentoo is fine, overblown completely.
My little Linux and tech blog
Actually, you do not have to wait for portage to get the updates. You can copy the ebuild and the patch to your local directory and digest it then install it. I've done it many a time while waiting for gentoo to update a package I needed.
The simplest difference between gentoo and binary distros is NOT that you compile your own. That is just a side effect. What is far more important is that you have the CODE, or rather more importantly, the HEADERS!
If you EVER tried to compile a package yourselve on a binary distro you will have found that you first have to download a ton of headers, wich are often out of date, or you are using some weird binary.
Simply put, if I want to compile a package on gentoo on my own I can do so by JUST compiling the package, I do not first have to download the package with the linux headers for my kernel, because the headers, and everything is already there.
This is important for when you are chasing the cutting edge, and cutting edge on gentoo ain't beta's, even alpha's are considered kiddie work. Real gentoo users run with custom made patches handrolled by the developers to fix YOUR bug. It is what seperates the men from the boys. Unstable? My machine is locked in a cupboard, I have a bolt on the outside, at night I hear it clawing at the door, testing for a weakness, I sleep with one eye open cluthcing a desert eagle.
Offcourse for you girls, you can use debian.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I ran Gentoo for a couple years. I'm now running a mix of Ubuntu and OSX, mostly because to get all the software options I wanted, I couldn't pare down the libraries enough that my system was substantially different at the end from Ubuntu. I'd be sad to see Gentoo go downhill, though. There's a lot of value for the Linux community in people hammering on bleeding edge software. Where else would you have seen so much interest in applying genetic algorithms to find the best gcc optimization flags for compiling software?
I forgot to mention my completely unscientific method for determining the size of the Gentoo community. I've been involved in a lot of open source projects, as a developer and a user, so therefore I have jumped ship from many of them. Usually, right before the quaterdeck gets wet, all the helpful users leave; the ones that remain and answer questions give you answers like "your hardware is rubbish, buy this, its what I have, it works" or "Go read the documentation."
The least that can be done is pointing the user at the right place in the documentation, if you don't feel like repeating it just now.
Performing sanity checks on your own beliefs is vital in avoiding poisoned koolaid.
I don't give a damn what ppl say. Gentoo is an awesome powerful technological feat!! Let me tell you about something. I've dealt with Ubuntu, and hell, that shiieieat is the worst crap on earth. Freezes at random times, when I switched from Gnome to Xubuntu it was left broken beyond repair now all is screwed up. Not to mention the fucking Package Manager, to date I haven't been able to UNINSTALL the OO.org for christ sake!!! Ubuntu chartrooms aren't helpful either, countless times I've been there to ask about un-installing OO.org and I was told to use a thousand ways TO NO F@$%^@#$%@#$ EFFECT!! Xubuntu doesn't have a goddamn printer dialog!!! Searching for packages is the oddest way, cumbersome, unclear and so on.
Anyway, I am astounded how this crappy distro is stealing the limelight. Compared to Gentoo, which I use a modified version, and I am not even a coder or reached geekdom, my computer stays on for days and days. Of course there a few things that need to be fix but aren't in the way of a proper functioning system. And the package management is crystal clear, easy and straightforward WYSIWYG.
Actually I do agree that Gentoo isn't for the average user. For a while I thought Gentoo was awesome and attempted to help people use it. Believe me ALL THE EFFORT to no avail. Because, what I've noticed, ppl actually DON'T WANT to look for instructions how to use it. They expect the software to have psychical powers and read their wishes. I found this kinda astounding. Shiieat. I strongly believe their should be some sort of classes and an ID REQUIRED BY LAW in order to use computers, and PUNISHABLE when they use it without the license. Just like driving cars, I mean do you fucking see ppl jumping into cars without any knowledge and start driving??!!!!! FOR CHRIST SAKE NOOOO!! Half of the population would be DEAD by now with the accidents.
Well, this is the same with computers. Almost 99% of the problems is because stupid lusers USERS.
Anyway I'll stop my rant right here.
Gentoo IS THE DISTRO. Whoever disagrees is wrong, WRONG. I ain't no h4x0r and I can use Gentoo? So could all Slashdot crowd. Therefore all those criticism about Gentoo are NULL and VOID. It's all because YOU DIDN'T take the effort to use it in the first place. You are solely to blame because you weren't patient and did not pay attention.
The guide is pretty clear, chat and forums are helpful and the OS WORKS!!!
Besides Flameeyes left because of negative social attitudes NOT BECAUSE GENTOO DOESN'T WORK. And guess what he'll prolly end up coming back. ROFL!!
Bye and Long Live Gentoo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What about:
-1, Rampant Faggotry
-2, Zealous Pimpleface
-3, ESR Buttfucker
?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Do you fuck it, too?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
ok then leave Gentoo. Don't use it. Or you could fix it otherwise STFU and GTFOO
Potage works fine for me.
Actually, there are a lot of idiots criticizing Gentoo. Why do I use it...
i ght-xboing.html for details.
1) Good-bye to dependancy-hell. I started off in 2000 on Redhat. It was nice for beginners (through 7.3) but some relatively simple programs were murder to install. The developer who put together the RPM for a program I wanted happened to have optional package A on his machine, so the RPM linked to it as a mandatory dependancy. Package A depended on package B, which depended on library C, etc, etc. It would take forever to track down RPMs for the dependancies. And woe unto you if you wanted 2 apps, where the RPM maintainer of app A had different versions of some libraries than the RPM maintainer of app B. Try the following dependancy torture test...
- install a text-only base system
- attempt to install Gimp
Gentoo will figure out and, pull in, and compile the base X libs, and all the necessary dependancies, and a few hours later (I run it overnight and get some sleep) you'll end up with a working X, running basic TWM, and a working Gimp. Try that on an RPM-based distro, I dare ya. I actually prefer Blackbox as my WM, so I "emerge bbkeys". SInce bbkeys depends on Blackbox, portage pulls in Blackbox, and all is copacetic.
2) I can control what optional crap is/isn't built in. I got rid of pam and java and ipv6, via the USE variable. The thing about *PERSONAL* computers is that they're personal, and one size does not fit all. For those of you running a server with multiple people logging on, yes pam is a good idea. For my personal 1-user home machine, it's overkill. If you need something that needs java, fine. What I don't understand is why java can be squeezed into a cellphone, but takes up almost a gig on my harddrive just to allow a singing/dancing webpage. I don't miss it. And my ISP doesn't support ipv6, so I don't see the point in various apps calling ipv6 addresses first, waiting for the timeout, and them getting around to connect on ipv4.
3) Yes, there is a speedup on *SOME* apps. Obviously, disk I/O bound apps won't benefit. I did have a "negative experience" with an old video game "Xboing". I used to run it on my 1999 Dell 450 mhz PIII with 128 megs of ram and 8 meg video card. I could handle it up to "speed level 3". On Gentoo, it flew by so fast that it was unplayable, even at speed level 1. Yes, *THE SAME MACHINE*, no upgrades at all. I had to manually step through the "emerge" process, and patch the delay loop. See http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-131884-highl
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Quite possible. Still, it doesn't seem that dark in here.
"All it [glsa-check] does is tell you which pkgs you have installed which have disclosed sec. vulnerabilities."
No. will pull them in for you. No muss, no fuss.
"You have to do the same thing. Wait for new versions in portage. "
No. I can patch the source and roll my own. With
"But you only need to do it once, unlike gentoo where you have a different version than you did 2 weeks ago."
Not really, no. Usually when you pull in a sec fix it's usually just a jump between distro-provided revisions (package_foo-2.1-r1 to package_foo-2.1-r2) so config files don't normally change either.
Frankly, the practice of backporting fixes is not appealing to me. If upstream decides the change is big enough to warrant a new version, well, y'know, it's their app, they should know. Backports are a good way to accumulate cruft. You are welcome to your own opinion, though, and I am well aware that there are people for whom staying current simply isn't an option.
"Of course you don't agree, you couldn't possibly see someone running debian, right?"
No. I can and do see people running debian. I just didn't think you're one of them, because of that "I don't have to change config files" comment which came off as uninformed.
"Um, well, see, updating production servers is something system administrators do."
You haven't answered my question. You say you need stable packages and whatnot, then you claim you "had to" do a version bump three days after rollout. Something doesn't jive.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
It is time to defend and recommend the distro that made me leave Windows for good, 3 years ago. Gentoo is not about speed, is not about "h0ly c0w, i'm t0tally going s0 fast, oh f***". It is the best out there for everyone who wants the latest fixes, the greatest software, with all the stability, and no compromises. Sure, it isn't easy, and that's why I recommend always Ubuntu for newbies. But it's flexible. As flexible as you can get.
1. Cairo 1.4.0 is out. It has amazing speed improvements (improvements that don't have anything to do with -O99). And I want it now. With other distros, I have three choices: compile Cairo by myself and expose myself to horrid ABI breakages, wait for the next roll up release, or try to run distro version 10.X ALPHA, with a NIGHTMARISH stability. With Gentoo, the solution is to type emerge --sync && emerge cairo. Repeat with every important package updated.
2. You've updated 30 binary packages. If you want to use them now, you either wait until your distro-maker stabilises the mix, or fix all your issues manually. Of course, all people prefer to wait. With Gentoo, I can fix that easily with revdep-rebuild.
3. You can't have this kind of flexibility without being a source-based distro. Ask yourself why every distro maker spends 3, 4 months stabilising their distro and you'll know why.
4. I can't count how many times have I compiled my kernel. I experienced the hell of kernel compiling with SuSE 5.3 (binary kernel using custom patches, vanilla sources => I can't have all the features of the distro unless I research what's in the blob, find and apply by hand every patch there is in the binary kernel => HELL). When I want a new kernel, I select a new want and compile it. When I want a new kernel in a binary distro... well, I'm out of luck until the next release. Let alone changing the patch set (Realtime Preemption patches are a nightmare for normal users, unless you use Gentoo... you can emerge rt-sources and that's the end of the story)
5. I CAN USE BETAS, ALPHAS, SVN TREES, at WILL and with a COMPLETE AWARENESS OF THE PACKAGING SYSTEM. The difference between pulling a Subversion tree by yourself and "emerge whatever-svn" is huge. It is specially huge when you have to uninstall your SVN-compiled binary.
6. USE flags are still vital. My desktop is KDE-only. I even have compiled Compiz without GNOME but WITH GCONF SUPPORT. That degree of control is only achievable with source compiling. Portage makes it easy.
Gentoo has its place. It is not for the mainstream Linux user. It is for the enthusiast, who wants to tweak everything to the extreme. The entire Linux ecosystem depends on Gentoo for its bugfixing, because Gentoo users can always use the latest and can test anything. We must not allow it to die. Gentoo is the ultimate tool for geeks, and that must be its ultimate goal.
Found on http://www.gentoo.org/
Triggered by recent examples of bad behavior and dissatisfaction among developers and users alike, the Gentoo Council has drafted a new Code of Conduct that will be enforced for both developers and users. The draft version of the Code of Conduct is currently being discussed on the Gentoo-dev mailing list. To subscribe, send an email to Gentoo-dev+subscribe@lists.Gentoo.org or read the archive.
The Code of Conduct will be voted upon by the Gentoo Council Thursday, March 15th; implementation will be immediate upon final approval. The Code of Conduct describes what the Gentoo Council has deemed acceptable and unacceptable behavior. It also describes the punishment that will be enforced if the Code of Conduct is breached.
The Gentoo Council expects the Code of Conduct to end the bad behavior shown by some and hope it will help Developer Relations enforce good behavior among the developers.
The Gentoo Council has scheduled a Question and Answer session Wednesday, March 14th between 2100UTC and 2300UTC in the #gentoo-council channel on the Freenode IRC network, irc://irc.freenode.net. We welcome all interested parties to participate in the Question & Answer session.
Haven't used Windows in 10 years. Started with slackware. Moved to Redhat, then Debian. Settled on Gentoo a few years back and haven't changed since. Like any Linux/OSS/Gnu effort Gentoo has it's ups and downs, but I doubt it's going away any time soon. It's core competency is source code distribution and fine-grained tweaking, and I suspect there are enough users who want that to keep it going. Sure, if your goal is to effortlessly run aMSN or fire up OpenOffice spreadsheets, get another distro. I install Ubuntu on the systems I build for family members. But for supporting obscure programs nothing beats Gentoo. For example, I use xfoil occasionally. When the 4.0 gcc broke it due to reworked g77 code, I was able to fix it on the spot with a quick portage overlay patch and post a bug report/patch upstream. And for other esoteric apps that aren't in the portage tree, it is a lot easier to create a quick ebuild in a portage overlay than it is to work up an rpm or dep package. Yeah, sometimes I wish the Gentoo quality control was a little better, but I still find it easier to keep Gentoo current than any other distro I've used in the past. And for supporting or building the obscure scientific/engineering apps I like to run no other distro comes close.