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

[Wiktor Wandachowicz]

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.

Regards,
Wiktor Wandachowicz

PS. I'm already on the CC list of bug #116030 for the same reasons, but
I've been mostly quiet because I do know my tools ;) But OTOH I've been
already running Gentoo for a while....

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