Gentoo Archives: gentoo-doc

From: Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@g.o>
To: gentoo-doc@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-doc] Stage1/2 deprecation from Gentoo Handbook
Date: Wed, 09 Nov 2005 19:56:13
Message-Id: 1131566006.11834.75.camel@cgianelloni.nuvox.net
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-doc] Stage1/2 deprecation from Gentoo Handbook by Arun Raghavan
1 On Thu, 2005-11-10 at 00:50 +0530, Arun Raghavan wrote:
2 > Call me an idealist, but this sounds too much like a "guilty until
3 > proven innocent" thing. I'm a "normal" Gentoo user, and had absolutely
4 > no trouble following the stage1 instructions. Let's leave the "the
5 > user is dumb" assumptions to Microsoft.
6
7 As I've said 1000 times now, you wasted your time if you followed the
8 Handbook. The whole point is that following the Handbook's instructions
9 for a stage1 installation gains you exactly nil, but costs you vast
10 amounts of time. The entire purpose of a stage1 tarball has been
11 distorted by countless people recommending it as an installation method
12 for everyone. The purpose of a stage1 tarball was for customizing your
13 bootstrap yourself. This means *editing* bootstrap.sh and making your
14 own changes to enact a build that wasn't envisioned by the Gentoo
15 developers. As you can guess, this isn't exactly something we had
16 documented, and for good reason. There are endless possibilities on
17 what you could do in this script. The wording in the current Handbook
18 on this really isn't strong enough. Were it up to me, it would say
19 something along the lines of:
20
21 "Stage1. Don't do it. Ever."
22
23 It would probably also be in big, red, flashing text.
24
25 I'll give you a good example. I have my own local bootstrap script that
26 causes my machines to build multiple cross-compilers during the
27 bootstrap process. It is this level of customization that cannot be
28 reached during this early phase of installation that the stage1 tarball
29 is meant to be used to accomplish. Running "emerge --sync &&
30 scripts/bootstrap.sh" is not empowering you to do anything but cause
31 possible problems which are then pushed onto the developers as "errors"
32 and "bugs", which they really are not.
33
34 > Instead, a prominent explamnation and warning about what doing
35 > so-and-so would entail would be good.
36
37 As I have also stated before, I am looking at completely removing the
38 stage1 tarball from distribution in the future. I simply no longer have
39 the time to troubleshoot the countless errors that are reported as bugs,
40 that are really configuration issues from the users themselves. Also,
41 the net gain of providing these tarballs is at best minimal, and at
42 worse very negative.
43
44 We are all volunteers here. Wasting what little time we have donated to
45 Gentoo tracking down problems with a broken process is not the best use
46 of our time. Making new features and improving quality is, though. Any
47 time that I spend working on a stage1 issue is time that I am *not*
48 spending testing and developing.
49
50 --
51 Chris Gianelloni
52 Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
53 x86 Architecture Team
54 Games - Developer
55 Gentoo Linux

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