On Wed, 2005-11-09 at 17:32 +0100, Gregorio Guidi wrote:
> > Doing a bootstrap from a stage3 tarball is worthless.  You've made it
> > sound like users should bootstrap from a stage3 tarball.
> >
> > While I completely agree that it is all in how you present it, there are
> > certain things that we absolutely wish to get away from, and one of them
> > is having the user *ever* run bootstrap.sh themselves.
> 
> Sure, I was thinking at the handbook in the followng terms: for users that 
> want maximum customization (ex stage1 users) it should suggest to untar the 
> stage, tweak make.conf and run emerge -e system, while for other users (ex 
> stage3 users) it should suggest to untar the stage and go on with the normal 
> instructions.

I believe that is the general idea, except telling the user to do the
"emerge -e system" even on a stage3 tarball should be at the end of the
Handbook's install section, simply because it isn't a requirement for
installation.

Basically, at the end it would say something along the lines of:

If you have not already, you can customize your system with your own
CFLAGS now.  The procedure for updating your complete system is... with
some pointers to the various parts of "Using Portage".

...or something similar.  Honestly, I would leave that up to the better
judgement of the GDP.  The main goal is to reduce errors generated by
our users due to the extreme flexibility of the current setup, while
still not removing the choice.  I tend to find that if a user has to go
elsewhere to read something, they're less likely to do it.  This will
keep the inexperienced users from doing a stage1-style installation.
Truthfully, a person should be familiar with how portage works before
doing a stage1-style installation, simply so they can troubleshoot their
own issues.

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