Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: The Age of the Universe

[Luis Francisco Araujo]

Wiktor Wandachowicz wrote:
> Simon Stelling wrote:
>
>> Edgar Hucek wrote:
>>> I know my tools but not necessarly the normal user who wanna use gentoo
>>> and is ending frustrated.
>> If the users are too lazy to read the documentation, why should we care
>> about them?
>
> Because we risk that Gentoo may receive the "user-UN-friendly" label and
> become irrelevant in the long run? I know it ain't gonna happen, but still.
>
> Both Edgar and you have some valid points. He refers mostly to the out-of-box
> experience, which includes compiling GNOME and its dependencies at the install
> time. With USE="accessibility" enabled, which makes perfect sense for people
> with disabilities. And then the first-ever Gentoo installation breaks on the
> speech-tools and festival.
>
> How would *you* feel in such case?
>
> You OTOH bring to the table a fact that developers shouldn't be that much
> concerned with the stabilization/testing of packages before new release of
> installation media. But new releases *ARE* targeted specifically at new users
> and it's them who suffer the most. Next to it is the reputation of Gentoo and
> its developers. Edgar's call was targeted mostly at releng and QA teams, who
> should poke developers to decrease number of similar problems.
>
> I maintain a bunch of Debian/sparc, Debian/i386, Gentoo/amd64, Gentoo/x86,
> Solaris/sparc, Ubuntu/i686 boxes and mind you, out-of-box experience at
> install time means A LOT.
>
> More respect to the users => more respect to Gentoo.
>

Let's see...

Several points (misunderstandings) need to be clarified.

1) Gentoo is not intended to be an out-of-the-box distro, but instead, a 
customizable distro. Can see the difference?.. There are many, one of 
them is that users should 'make' the process of using Gentoo _friendly_ 
partially by themselves through reading documentation and tutorial when 
needed (and sometimes going through a list of bugs to know what it is 
going on).

2) Gentoo releases are "very".touppercase different to most of the other 
distros. Gentoo releases are mainly intended to be used as a tool to get 
you started building your _own_ system in an automatic way through 
scripts/metadata, this being very different to other distros, where they 
simply force you to use version 6.6.6 as a bunch of dead packages that 
won't likely suffer any major changes within the next 6 months until 
upgrading (which can be a very painful process) to the next 6.6.7 release.

This is precisely why i say Gentoo is an incremental meta-distro.

3) Considering the two points above, i therefore think , there is no 
point (and actually makes no sense) to bitch at our releng team (which 
did a great job) because two packages don't currently compile.

4) Gentoo is more a community than anything else. So we indeed all 
deserve respect. Some developers put into this project (the releng team 
being one of them) a lot of effort, so making comments like this thread 
might be very insulting for many people; apart of making false claims 
that could lead to a bunch of misconceptions. Now who is being 
disrespectful?

If neither of those points are convincing enough, then remember free 
software comes with *NO-WARRANTY*

Thanks,

My 0.2bs



-- 


Luis F. Araujo "araujo at gentoo.org"
Gentoo Linux


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