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On Thu, 2005-11-10 at 00:50 +0530, Arun Raghavan wrote: |
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> Call me an idealist, but this sounds too much like a "guilty until |
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> proven innocent" thing. I'm a "normal" Gentoo user, and had absolutely |
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> no trouble following the stage1 instructions. Let's leave the "the |
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> user is dumb" assumptions to Microsoft. |
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|
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As I've said 1000 times now, you wasted your time if you followed the |
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Handbook. The whole point is that following the Handbook's instructions |
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for a stage1 installation gains you exactly nil, but costs you vast |
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amounts of time. The entire purpose of a stage1 tarball has been |
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distorted by countless people recommending it as an installation method |
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for everyone. The purpose of a stage1 tarball was for customizing your |
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bootstrap yourself. This means *editing* bootstrap.sh and making your |
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own changes to enact a build that wasn't envisioned by the Gentoo |
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developers. As you can guess, this isn't exactly something we had |
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documented, and for good reason. There are endless possibilities on |
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what you could do in this script. The wording in the current Handbook |
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on this really isn't strong enough. Were it up to me, it would say |
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something along the lines of: |
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|
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"Stage1. Don't do it. Ever." |
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|
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It would probably also be in big, red, flashing text. |
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|
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I'll give you a good example. I have my own local bootstrap script that |
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causes my machines to build multiple cross-compilers during the |
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bootstrap process. It is this level of customization that cannot be |
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reached during this early phase of installation that the stage1 tarball |
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is meant to be used to accomplish. Running "emerge --sync && |
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scripts/bootstrap.sh" is not empowering you to do anything but cause |
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possible problems which are then pushed onto the developers as "errors" |
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and "bugs", which they really are not. |
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|
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> Instead, a prominent explamnation and warning about what doing |
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> so-and-so would entail would be good. |
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|
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As I have also stated before, I am looking at completely removing the |
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stage1 tarball from distribution in the future. I simply no longer have |
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the time to troubleshoot the countless errors that are reported as bugs, |
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that are really configuration issues from the users themselves. Also, |
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the net gain of providing these tarballs is at best minimal, and at |
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worse very negative. |
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|
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We are all volunteers here. Wasting what little time we have donated to |
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Gentoo tracking down problems with a broken process is not the best use |
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of our time. Making new features and improving quality is, though. Any |
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time that I spend working on a stage1 issue is time that I am *not* |
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spending testing and developing. |
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|
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-- |
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Chris Gianelloni |
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Release Engineering - Strategic Lead |
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x86 Architecture Team |
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Games - Developer |
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Gentoo Linux |