On Mon, 2005-11-07 at 21:32 +0900, Jason Stubbs wrote:
> On Monday 07 November 2005 19:22, Paul Waring wrote:
> > When one of the key complaints about Linux is that the documentation is
> > often lacking, I'm surprised to see a distro with some of the best
> > manuals considering doing away (or at least hiding somewhere else) with
> > parts of it.
> 
> It's not about the documentation. It's mostly about portage actually. Certain 
> sets of USE flags create circular dependencies that portage doesn't deal with 
> well or at all. Packages then fail to build and bugs get posted. What did the 
> user do wrong? Nothing. What can the user do? Figure out where the circular 
> dependency is and manually solve it. Should the steps on how to do that be 
> added to the Stage1/2 install guide? I'd think not.

Correct.  Not only are circular dependencies an issue, but dependencies
that break the flow of the Handbook are quite common.  A prime example
is hal.  There are combinations of USE flags that will pull in hal as a
dependency when doing "emerge -e system" to go from stage2 to stage3.
The problem is that the Handbook does not have the user install a kernel
*prior* to stage3.  The user does not have a configured kernel, nor even
sources installed.  The sources for the default kernel virtual are
installed, whether the user wants these sources or not, and hal looks
for a kernel configuration, then fails when it cannot find one.  How
exactly would you document this?

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux