It's just not trendy to knock on Slackware, so everyone targets Gentoo.
Some people also love to ignore advances that are made. The article mentions how long it took to install Gentoo. He claims that there was not an installer when he performed his installation more than a year ago. This is false. There was an installer, but it was considered experimental. Since then, the installer has become the de facto installation method on x86/amd64 and will be the default method on other architectures as support is added for them.
As for updates, who in the world out there has a ton of servers, then compiles on all of them? What is this guy smoking and where can I get some? Does he not realize that you can upgrade only what you want? There's nothing forcing you to upgrade the entire system. Hell, there's nothing forcing you to ever update the portage tree on your servers.
Any place where I'm ending up with more than one or two Gentoo boxes, I setup a local "master" server. This server will host my portage tree, which I don't update. It will also host my overlay. I update packages and add my own packages in this overlay. I build binary packages on this "master" server and distribute them to my servers. This really isn't a hard concept. It also isn't much different than the sort of thing that any sane administrator would do with any distribution. You don't just blindly run Red Hat updates, do you?
I think the biggest problem here is one of perception. People seem to ignore that when you buy Red Hat/SuSE, you are buying a product. You're buying support and service. With Gentoo, you're "buying" a toolset and nothing more. It's the difference between buying a car, and getting a bunch of parts and tools. They simply aren't comparable. If you want a nice Gentoo server infrastructure, you have to build it!
Gentoo has projects, such as the Scire project, which are designed to create a more enterprise-ready management set for Gentoo. However, this will not be a default for Gentoo, since few of our users would need it. Like everything else with Gentoo, you pick what you want from the tools provided, and you customize and tailor it to fit your needs. This entire article reads like a rant from someone who chose a tool because of its properties, then complained about those exact properties. You don't get to bitch when the "do-it-yourself" distribution asks you to do it yourself.;]
I'm glad Gentoo exists as a solution for the people who want it, but some people pitch it as the end-all be-all solution of linux machines, and that's just not how it goes. With the proper administrator, even Fedora will run well on a server.
...of course, I'm biased. I've used Slackware for 10 years or so and that will make ANYONE a curmudgeon.
Exactly. Gentoo is a solution for people to use how they see fit. No more... no less. It isn't the solution for everyone, nor do we try to be. Instead, we try to be a solution for as many people as possible, and give the user the tools necessary to tailor the distribution to suit their needs if it doesn't already.
1. Theoretically, faster than any other distro.
Yes, theoretically. Practically, you don't see or feel the difference. Citing this as #1 reason to use gentoo is stupid.
Actually, it really depends on the software/hardware combination. For example, using Gentoo on an Opteron box doesn't show much variation, since the baseline is a CPU with AMD64/EM64T extensions already. The difference in PPC, however, can be pretty astonishing. At the same time, the PS3 is PPC64, so this whole point is moot here since the distribution is already optimized pretty closely to the capabilities as a baseline. About the only thing we offer over most other 64-bit PPC systems is Altivec for the PS3 by default, but we aren't the only ones.
2. Modular distro, so you have full control over the installation.
Oh yeah, because the other distros dictate which software you have to install
I believe he means the ability to change how things are compiled via USE flags, such as the ability to disable LDAP support in your system, as another commenter said.
3. It teaches you more about Linux.
Yes, because watching compiler output scrolling by for 8 hours gives me super linux skillz!
When will the Gentoo hater quit using this crap? You don't learn shit from watching compiler output. What you learn from is editing configuration files and seeing how changes you make to the system directly affect the output of that system.
4. You can update it whenever you want, don't have to wait for the latest version of the distro like Fedora Core 5/6, Yellow Dog Linux 5
Ah, you mean it's like with the other distros who let you download the latest and greatest. Debian testing is usually pretty bleeding edge, and Debian is considered to be one of the slowest distros to upgrade....
That distinction is usually held for Debian's stable release, not the distribution as a whole. Of course, the article is pretty full of it on this point, since many distributions allow for more frequent upgrades these days.
5. Huge community of people, and the best documentation among all Linux distros, so you'll never have unsolved problems.
Hmmm. Google "gentoo problem": 1,520,000 results
Huge community? I would say Ubuntu or SuSe or Red Hat all have far bigger communities.
Had you said "Debian" to include Debian/Ubuntu/Knoppix/all the other derivatives, I would agree. The other communities are likely much larger. Red Hat seems to be quite a bit smaller than it used to be, especially outside the United States. While the Gentoo community definitely isn't the largest, our documentation surely is some of the best out there.
This article does show one of the major downfalls of Gentoo. There are a large number of "fanboys" who post false claims about Gentoo, and make the entire distribution look bad, as a result. Gentoo is primarily a developer platform, written by developers, for developers. It takes a very different approach to package management than other mainstream distributions, and provides tools to allow for greater customization easier than most others. Of course, there's nothing you can do on Gentoo that you cannot do elsewhere, it's just generally easier under Gentoo for those that know what they're doing. We provide tools that you use to tailor the distribution to suit your needs. For some people, that is exactly what they want, for others, it's too much work, and there's nothing wrong with that. We fill a specific role.
Considering HR has to work with the government, which tends to use PDF for their documents, they're going to have Acrobat Reader, or some other PDF-capable reader on their system already.
Funny that you say this considering I am currently under contract with a company designing a medical device that is using Gentoo as the basis for the operating system on both the medical device, as well as the operating system for the developer workstations used to design the software.
Remember that there's no more validation done for security with Red Hat, SuSE, etc before they release their software. The only guarantees that a binary distribution makes is that the software they've provided works with each other and is as usable as possible. I think you need to realize that almost anyone building embedded devices does complete customization to the environment used to run their device. Look into the embedded space from Red Hat and you'll find that almost nobody is using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for their devices, as it is much too large and too generic. Instead, they home grow their own "distribution" which has exactly what they need and nothing more. My entire point is that Gentoo is better served in doing this, since that is a primary design goal of Gentoo, rather than binary distributions whose primary design is a coherent single product.
I'm sure that this will seem a bit obvious due to my close ties with the distribution, but Gentoo should be a good match for you. Gentoo has support for embedded systems, as well as one of the widest set of supported hardware platforms in the Linux world. It is source-based, which makes creating your modifications and customizations much easier. It has tools like catalyst, which allow you to easily build a customized distribution of your own, based on Gentoo. Gentoo is also free, which can be a big plus.
Essentially, your best solution is a distribution geared specifically for your devices. I think that Gentoo works as a good platform for basing your distribution from, as it is simple to learn and understand, as the entire system is very open and transparent.
Gentoo is not something for the person who does not want to learn and does not want to tinker. As someone else in these comments posted, Gentoo asks you what you want to do, then proceeds to do *exactly* what you asked it. If you tell it to do something stupid, it does something stupid. The sheer number of people that see the whole pam-login/shadow blocker as an error just goes to show that the people do not understand Gentoo are the ones that complain the most. I'll be honest. I'm glad to see those people leaving in droves. Gentoo is not for them. It never was. People seem to forget that the Gentoo developers call Gentoo a metadistribution. We allow you to build what you want. This doesn't mean that everything is done for you. Over the past few weeks, I've been encouraging certain people to start using Ubuntu. These are the ones that don't read any documentation, and either ask a question for every prompt/response scenario, or bash everything they don't understand. Seriously, go to Ubuntu. You'll like it much better there. What Gentoo is really about is customization. That is its biggest strength. If you're not willing to put in the time, then you're definitely using the Wrong Tool(tm) for your job. Find a better tool.
No. That just gets you to the release profile, which is generally nothing more than the default USE the release was built using. Changing your profile link doesn't change your release, it simply changes the defaults the system will try to use. Otherwise, how could their possibly be non-release profiles? (Hint: because profiles are not solely tied to releases and vice-versa)
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!).
Umm... that's called a blocker and it is done intentionally to keep you from screwing up your own system. Perhaps you should read section 2 of the Handbook, that clearly explains how portage works, what a blocker is, and what you should do when you get one. No offense, but we can't fix stupid.
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.)
The state of the tree is consistent with itself. It had nothing to do with packages depending on PAM or shadow. The entire situation was that at one time, the "login" program was split out into a separate package when you merged "shadow" with USE="pam" and with newer versions of shadow, it was re-integrated. Because of this, one needed to first unmerge pam-login, which is why a blocker was added. This is normal and expected behavior on a Gentoo system. Now, the whole 2005.whatever comment just shows that you really don't know what you're talking about, since the release information is only important when you're booting from the CD and unpacking the tarball. Everything after that point would be "Gentoo Linux as of my last emerge --sync" not "Gentoo Linux 2005.whatever" as Gentoo is in constant motion. But you knew that, didn't you?
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.
Now that we've gotten that out of the way, this might actually be cool. If they don't change the charater acting any, and only focus on effects, it really won't harm the show. Of course, sometimes the 60's effects technology is what makes the show good, so I guess we'll just see.
I would much rather this country, and all other countries, for that matter, deice to instead focus on the "War on Stupidity" which is a scourge on our planet.
See, this kind of argument makes me want to beat someone over the head. A proper password, or more accurately, passphrase, doesn't have to be something nobody can remember. How about this one?
"What will we do? I know! We'll drink 'till she's hot!"
Now, as you can see, this is a fairly humorous quote from Family Guy. It is easy to remember for anyone familiar with the show, and it is complex enough to be hard enough to crack for all but the most determined crackers.
It's funny that you mention Dilbert. I'm one of those people that loves what he does, but not necessarily his "job" as it stands. We have a running joke where I work that Scott Adams must be hiding in the basement, watching us from the multiple video cameras around all of the "secured doors". Truthfully, it is because he bases his work on his own experience, most of which was at Pacific Bell, and I work for a telecommunications company myself.
Outsourcing isn't something I see. I don't know of anyone personally, or have even *heard* of anyone losing their job due to outsourcing. Most likely, someone might not have gotten *hired* because they chose to use offshore programmers, but I don't think people are getting fired in droves or anything.
Seriously, take the advice of almost everyone here. Pick a career because you like it and want to do it, not because CNN says it it hot.
A lot of this is really true, but it isn't just because of Daniel. Lots of the portage code was thrown together very hastily. Most of the features were tacked on, without any concept of how much of a mess it was making the code. The current portge team has been working to rectify this situation, but it is very hard to do when you have something like portage and must keep backwards compatibility while still keeping yourself sane. There was the portage-ng project which was supposed to be this miraculous re-write that simply never happened because ti was damn near impossible. The guys are trying to clean things up and make it more usable, as well as more modular and better designed (yeah, they actually have a design for it). I expect it to take a long time to get portage cleaned up, but at least it is being worked on by some good people.
This is pretty close to the truth. Amongst the Gentoo developers, the general consensus was "Well, he has to eat, doesn't he?"
Daniel didn't leave Gentoo for Microsoft. Daniel had already left Gentoo. It just happens that he kept himself low on the radar until his job at Microsoft, which spawned this giant set of conspiracy theories from the uneducated on the matter. As far as Gentoo was concerned, it was a non-issue. Daniel is a good guy and we all wished him luck. There were no harsh feelings and nobody that had a clue what was going on thought that the sky was falling. It was pretty much the same sensationalist jackasses that make a big deal out of everything that made a big deal about Daniel's "defection" to Microsoft.
It might be plausible had he not removed himself from the project well over a year before his job at Microsoft ever came about. Even before that he was lessening his role more and more, for both financial and personal reasons. The simple truth of the matter is that Daniel Robbins hadn't done much for Gentoo in quite some time. Sure he started the thing, but it was the 300 other people that are still active that were doing all of the work by that point. Daniel even at that time was focusing on "paid work" more than Gentoo, as he had racked up a pretty hefty personal debt bringing Gentoo into the world.
I sincerely wish Daniel the best of luck in his new position. He is the type of person that needs an itch to scratch. Being the local "Linux expert" at Microsoft probably isn't the most fulfilling job for a former open source developer like Daniel.
Except there's a simple fact that most people miss. Daniel had quit contributing long before he worked at Microsoft. In fact, once the Gentoo Metastructure project was formed to give Gentoo a management structure, Daniel slowly backed away out of the picture. Once the Gentoo Foundation was formed, he left completely. It was probably a good year or two before he ever went to work at Microsoft where he wasn't "contributing" much, so if this was Microsoft's intention, they wasted their money.
The Gentoo Foundation is a not-for-profit company. We are not a charity. Donations to Gentoo cannot be written off. Our goals have nothing to do with making money and everything to do with making software.
He didn't necessarily say that he is buying a Windows server. He used a Windows server as an example. There are tons of people that have crappy licensing besides Microsoft. The main thing you have to ask yourself is do you really require their software, or can other, cheaper, software do just fine.
If you're looking to build a web server with a SQL back-end, can a LAMP setup give you what you need or do you need Windows/IIS/MSSQL? Do you need that SCO server, or can a FreeBSD box do it just as well? This can only really be answered by the person deciding on the infrastructure.
As for the reasoning for having a CAL? Well, you're still paying for them, aren't you? So long as people continue to allow companies to extort money out of them with these sorts of licensing schemes, the longer they'll be around. They're basically printing money and nobody is really doing anything to stop them.
That's fine... and when I ask "does it work" what will your response be? If the Great-Grandparent poster didn't bother asking, well, the burden really falls on him. The seller, even if he was a douchebag for selling busted drives, never made claim that they worked, only that they were "used hard drives" which they were.
Slashdot Mirror
It's just not trendy to knock on Slackware, so everyone targets Gentoo.
Some people also love to ignore advances that are made. The article mentions how long it took to install Gentoo. He claims that there was not an installer when he performed his installation more than a year ago. This is false. There was an installer, but it was considered experimental. Since then, the installer has become the de facto installation method on x86/amd64 and will be the default method on other architectures as support is added for them.
As for updates, who in the world out there has a ton of servers, then compiles on all of them? What is this guy smoking and where can I get some? Does he not realize that you can upgrade only what you want? There's nothing forcing you to upgrade the entire system. Hell, there's nothing forcing you to ever update the portage tree on your servers.
Any place where I'm ending up with more than one or two Gentoo boxes, I setup a local "master" server. This server will host my portage tree, which I don't update. It will also host my overlay. I update packages and add my own packages in this overlay. I build binary packages on this "master" server and distribute them to my servers. This really isn't a hard concept. It also isn't much different than the sort of thing that any sane administrator would do with any distribution. You don't just blindly run Red Hat updates, do you?
I think the biggest problem here is one of perception. People seem to ignore that when you buy Red Hat/SuSE, you are buying a product. You're buying support and service. With Gentoo, you're "buying" a toolset and nothing more. It's the difference between buying a car, and getting a bunch of parts and tools. They simply aren't comparable. If you want a nice Gentoo server infrastructure, you have to build it!
Gentoo has projects, such as the Scire project, which are designed to create a more enterprise-ready management set for Gentoo. However, this will not be a default for Gentoo, since few of our users would need it. Like everything else with Gentoo, you pick what you want from the tools provided, and you customize and tailor it to fit your needs. This entire article reads like a rant from someone who chose a tool because of its properties, then complained about those exact properties. You don't get to bitch when the "do-it-yourself" distribution asks you to do it yourself. ;]
No offense meant to any of the non-Linux free software crowd, but...
Maybe they only care about Linux?
...of course, I'm biased. I've used Slackware for 10 years or so and that will make ANYONE a curmudgeon.
Exactly. Gentoo is a solution for people to use how they see fit. No more... no less. It isn't the solution for everyone, nor do we try to be. Instead, we try to be a solution for as many people as possible, and give the user the tools necessary to tailor the distribution to suit their needs if it doesn't already.Yes, theoretically. Practically, you don't see or feel the difference. Citing this as #1 reason to use gentoo is stupid.
Actually, it really depends on the software/hardware combination. For example, using Gentoo on an Opteron box doesn't show much variation, since the baseline is a CPU with AMD64/EM64T extensions already. The difference in PPC, however, can be pretty astonishing. At the same time, the PS3 is PPC64, so this whole point is moot here since the distribution is already optimized pretty closely to the capabilities as a baseline. About the only thing we offer over most other 64-bit PPC systems is Altivec for the PS3 by default, but we aren't the only ones.
2. Modular distro, so you have full control over the installation.Oh yeah, because the other distros dictate which software you have to install
I believe he means the ability to change how things are compiled via USE flags, such as the ability to disable LDAP support in your system, as another commenter said.
3. It teaches you more about Linux.Yes, because watching compiler output scrolling by for 8 hours gives me super linux skillz!
When will the Gentoo hater quit using this crap? You don't learn shit from watching compiler output. What you learn from is editing configuration files and seeing how changes you make to the system directly affect the output of that system.
4. You can update it whenever you want, don't have to wait for the latest version of the distro like Fedora Core 5/6, Yellow Dog Linux 5Ah, you mean it's like with the other distros who let you download the latest and greatest. Debian testing is usually pretty bleeding edge, and Debian is considered to be one of the slowest distros to upgrade....
That distinction is usually held for Debian's stable release, not the distribution as a whole. Of course, the article is pretty full of it on this point, since many distributions allow for more frequent upgrades these days.
5. Huge community of people, and the best documentation among all Linux distros, so you'll never have unsolved problems.Hmmm. Google "gentoo problem": 1,520,000 results
Huge community? I would say Ubuntu or SuSe or Red Hat all have far bigger communities.
Had you said "Debian" to include Debian/Ubuntu/Knoppix/all the other derivatives, I would agree. The other communities are likely much larger. Red Hat seems to be quite a bit smaller than it used to be, especially outside the United States. While the Gentoo community definitely isn't the largest, our documentation surely is some of the best out there.
This article does show one of the major downfalls of Gentoo. There are a large number of "fanboys" who post false claims about Gentoo, and make the entire distribution look bad, as a result. Gentoo is primarily a developer platform, written by developers, for developers. It takes a very different approach to package management than other mainstream distributions, and provides tools to allow for greater customization easier than most others. Of course, there's nothing you can do on Gentoo that you cannot do elsewhere, it's just generally easier under Gentoo for those that know what they're doing. We provide tools that you use to tailor the distribution to suit your needs. For some people, that is exactly what they want, for others, it's too much work, and there's nothing wrong with that. We fill a specific role.
"Portland, Oregon, had a free wireless project downtown FIVE YEARS AGO."
Sure... and Greenville, South Carolina had one about 3 years ago. However, covering *only* downtown isn't the same as city-wide municipal wi-fi.
Uhh... PDF?
Considering HR has to work with the government, which tends to use PDF for their documents, they're going to have Acrobat Reader, or some other PDF-capable reader on their system already.
Funny that you say this considering I am currently under contract with a company designing a medical device that is using Gentoo as the basis for the operating system on both the medical device, as well as the operating system for the developer workstations used to design the software.
Remember that there's no more validation done for security with Red Hat, SuSE, etc before they release their software. The only guarantees that a binary distribution makes is that the software they've provided works with each other and is as usable as possible. I think you need to realize that almost anyone building embedded devices does complete customization to the environment used to run their device. Look into the embedded space from Red Hat and you'll find that almost nobody is using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for their devices, as it is much too large and too generic. Instead, they home grow their own "distribution" which has exactly what they need and nothing more. My entire point is that Gentoo is better served in doing this, since that is a primary design goal of Gentoo, rather than binary distributions whose primary design is a coherent single product.
I'm sure that this will seem a bit obvious due to my close ties with the distribution, but Gentoo should be a good match for you. Gentoo has support for embedded systems, as well as one of the widest set of supported hardware platforms in the Linux world. It is source-based, which makes creating your modifications and customizations much easier. It has tools like catalyst, which allow you to easily build a customized distribution of your own, based on Gentoo. Gentoo is also free, which can be a big plus.
Essentially, your best solution is a distribution geared specifically for your devices. I think that Gentoo works as a good platform for basing your distribution from, as it is simple to learn and understand, as the entire system is very open and transparent.
It is actually quite simple.
They are not the intended audience.
Gentoo is not something for the person who does not want to learn and does not want to tinker. As someone else in these comments posted, Gentoo asks you what you want to do, then proceeds to do *exactly* what you asked it. If you tell it to do something stupid, it does something stupid. The sheer number of people that see the whole pam-login/shadow blocker as an error just goes to show that the people do not understand Gentoo are the ones that complain the most. I'll be honest. I'm glad to see those people leaving in droves. Gentoo is not for them. It never was. People seem to forget that the Gentoo developers call Gentoo a metadistribution. We allow you to build what you want. This doesn't mean that everything is done for you. Over the past few weeks, I've been encouraging certain people to start using Ubuntu. These are the ones that don't read any documentation, and either ask a question for every prompt/response scenario, or bash everything they don't understand. Seriously, go to Ubuntu. You'll like it much better there. What Gentoo is really about is customization. That is its biggest strength. If you're not willing to put in the time, then you're definitely using the Wrong Tool(tm) for your job. Find a better tool.
No. That just gets you to the release profile, which is generally nothing more than the default USE the release was built using. Changing your profile link doesn't change your release, it simply changes the defaults the system will try to use. Otherwise, how could their possibly be non-release profiles? (Hint: because profiles are not solely tied to releases and vice-versa)
Umm... that's called a blocker and it is done intentionally to keep you from screwing up your own system. Perhaps you should read section 2 of the Handbook, that clearly explains how portage works, what a blocker is, and what you should do when you get one. No offense, but we can't fix stupid.
The state of the tree is consistent with itself. It had nothing to do with packages depending on PAM or shadow. The entire situation was that at one time, the "login" program was split out into a separate package when you merged "shadow" with USE="pam" and with newer versions of shadow, it was re-integrated. Because of this, one needed to first unmerge pam-login, which is why a blocker was added. This is normal and expected behavior on a Gentoo system. Now, the whole 2005.whatever comment just shows that you really don't know what you're talking about, since the release information is only important when you're booting from the CD and unpacking the tarball. Everything after that point would be "Gentoo Linux as of my last emerge --sync" not "Gentoo Linux 2005.whatever" as Gentoo is in constant motion. But you knew that, didn't you?
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.
KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNN!!!
Now that we've gotten that out of the way, this might actually be cool. If they don't change the charater acting any, and only focus on effects, it really won't harm the show. Of course, sometimes the 60's effects technology is what makes the show good, so I guess we'll just see.
I would much rather this country, and all other countries, for that matter, deice to instead focus on the "War on Stupidity" which is a scourge on our planet.
See, this kind of argument makes me want to beat someone over the head. A proper password, or more accurately, passphrase, doesn't have to be something nobody can remember. How about this one?
"What will we do? I know! We'll drink 'till she's hot!"
Now, as you can see, this is a fairly humorous quote from Family Guy. It is easy to remember for anyone familiar with the show, and it is complex enough to be hard enough to crack for all but the most determined crackers.
It's funny that you mention Dilbert. I'm one of those people that loves what he does, but not necessarily his "job" as it stands. We have a running joke where I work that Scott Adams must be hiding in the basement, watching us from the multiple video cameras around all of the "secured doors". Truthfully, it is because he bases his work on his own experience, most of which was at Pacific Bell, and I work for a telecommunications company myself.
Outsourcing isn't something I see. I don't know of anyone personally, or have even *heard* of anyone losing their job due to outsourcing. Most likely, someone might not have gotten *hired* because they chose to use offshore programmers, but I don't think people are getting fired in droves or anything.
Seriously, take the advice of almost everyone here. Pick a career because you like it and want to do it, not because CNN says it it hot.
A lot of this is really true, but it isn't just because of Daniel. Lots of the portage code was thrown together very hastily. Most of the features were tacked on, without any concept of how much of a mess it was making the code. The current portge team has been working to rectify this situation, but it is very hard to do when you have something like portage and must keep backwards compatibility while still keeping yourself sane. There was the portage-ng project which was supposed to be this miraculous re-write that simply never happened because ti was damn near impossible. The guys are trying to clean things up and make it more usable, as well as more modular and better designed (yeah, they actually have a design for it). I expect it to take a long time to get portage cleaned up, but at least it is being worked on by some good people.
This is pretty close to the truth. Amongst the Gentoo developers, the general consensus was "Well, he has to eat, doesn't he?"
Daniel didn't leave Gentoo for Microsoft. Daniel had already left Gentoo. It just happens that he kept himself low on the radar until his job at Microsoft, which spawned this giant set of conspiracy theories from the uneducated on the matter. As far as Gentoo was concerned, it was a non-issue. Daniel is a good guy and we all wished him luck. There were no harsh feelings and nobody that had a clue what was going on thought that the sky was falling. It was pretty much the same sensationalist jackasses that make a big deal out of everything that made a big deal about Daniel's "defection" to Microsoft.
It might be plausible had he not removed himself from the project well over a year before his job at Microsoft ever came about. Even before that he was lessening his role more and more, for both financial and personal reasons. The simple truth of the matter is that Daniel Robbins hadn't done much for Gentoo in quite some time. Sure he started the thing, but it was the 300 other people that are still active that were doing all of the work by that point. Daniel even at that time was focusing on "paid work" more than Gentoo, as he had racked up a pretty hefty personal debt bringing Gentoo into the world.
I sincerely wish Daniel the best of luck in his new position. He is the type of person that needs an itch to scratch. Being the local "Linux expert" at Microsoft probably isn't the most fulfilling job for a former open source developer like Daniel.
Except there's a simple fact that most people miss. Daniel had quit contributing long before he worked at Microsoft. In fact, once the Gentoo Metastructure project was formed to give Gentoo a management structure, Daniel slowly backed away out of the picture. Once the Gentoo Foundation was formed, he left completely. It was probably a good year or two before he ever went to work at Microsoft where he wasn't "contributing" much, so if this was Microsoft's intention, they wasted their money.
Maya runs on Linux natively and has for a very long time.
The Gentoo Foundation is a not-for-profit company. We are not a charity. Donations to Gentoo cannot be written off. Our goals have nothing to do with making money and everything to do with making software.
He didn't necessarily say that he is buying a Windows server. He used a Windows server as an example. There are tons of people that have crappy licensing besides Microsoft. The main thing you have to ask yourself is do you really require their software, or can other, cheaper, software do just fine.
If you're looking to build a web server with a SQL back-end, can a LAMP setup give you what you need or do you need Windows/IIS/MSSQL? Do you need that SCO server, or can a FreeBSD box do it just as well? This can only really be answered by the person deciding on the infrastructure.
As for the reasoning for having a CAL? Well, you're still paying for them, aren't you? So long as people continue to allow companies to extort money out of them with these sorts of licensing schemes, the longer they'll be around. They're basically printing money and nobody is really doing anything to stop them.
The first rule of Gentoo is you don't talk about Gentoo...
The second rule of Gentoo is you don't talk about Gentoo...
I see a lot of new faces here tonight, which means a lot of you have been breaking the first two rules of Gentoo...
That's fine... and when I ask "does it work" what will your response be? If the Great-Grandparent poster didn't bother asking, well, the burden really falls on him. The seller, even if he was a douchebag for selling busted drives, never made claim that they worked, only that they were "used hard drives" which they were.