Gentoo Archives: gentoo-releng

From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@×××××××.net>
To: gentoo-releng@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-releng] Re: Free-standing Portage / Recent stage3 tarballs / Beta
Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2008 04:28:24
Message-Id: 47A69463.9050901@cesmail.net
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-releng] Re: Free-standing Portage / Recent stage3 tarballs / Beta by Alex Howells
1 Alex Howells wrote:
2 > I wasn't attempting to state "This does not work!"; merely expressing
3 > that ~arch isn't really a supported platform. Dropping back to stable
4 > isn't really a viable route, once your system is ~arch there's quite a
5 > lot to go <BOOM!> if you tried to globally undo that. Wanna try it?
6 > ;)
7
8 I've never had to, but yes, it's nearly impossible.
9
10 > At the moment Gentoo Linux has a reputation as a "ricer" distribution,
11 > and a large proportion of users on ~arch does nothing to solve that...
12 > Speaking entirely frankly I'd love to see increased adoption in
13 > enterprise, there's a whole lot this distribution has to offer to
14 > server farms, for example.
15
16 Well, there's nothing wrong with being a ricer. :) At the very least,
17 even if you stay with "stable", you can still compile "-O2 -march=" on
18 Gentoo. Most of the other distros saddle you with i386, and I have no
19 clue what optimization, if any, they do.
20
21 Gentoo in the enterprise? Nobody ever got fired for buying RHEL or
22 Novell SuSE. It's possible Ubuntu will get to that point someday, but
23 you aren't going to see a "pure community" distro like Gentoo, Debian,
24 or even Fedora any place where there's even a whiff of risk aversion.
25 Enterprise IT departments want to be able to call up a sales rep and
26 threaten to quit buying if the vendor doesn't come in and fix stuff *now*!
27
28 > Look at it this way: by running ~arch whilst *not* a Developer or
29 > Arch Tester you're having a very limited impact, or possibly a
30 > negative one. Getting onto the 'track' of contributing to the project
31 > through the various 'Arch Tester' teams is a great way for a "Power
32 > User" to help out; should you feel you're more technically inclined,
33 > can write a useful language or three / hack ebuilds as naturally as
34 > breathing, I know we need Developers! Especially in understaffed
35 > areas like Release Engineering. :)
36
37 Well, I put in a fair amount of free time with various open source
38 projects. I basically test stuff that I use, like R, Axiom, Common
39 Music, LyX and the Ruby language and its gems. And I'm also a student of
40 the innards of the Linux kernel. If I had any time left over from that
41 and my day job, I'd probably do something like make ebuilds for a few
42 packages I like that aren't in Portage, for example, the PRISM model
43 checker, CSound (which is a real challenge, by the way) or SMCSolver.
44
45 > I'd have liked to see two main things happen with Gentoo 2008.0:
46 >
47 > * Get rid of stage3 - all our install documentation works with
48 > just the stage3 right now, we don't "support" stage1/2
49 > installs yet users are /always/ asking on IRC and MLs
50 > for help with a stage1 install because they think it's l33t.
51 > Remove it from mirrors, put it in /experimental, whatever;
52 > we need the stage1/2 somewhere for lotsa reasons, but lets
53 > make it less obvious to weed out those clueless ricers.
54
55 Did you mean to say "get rid of stage3" or "get rid of stage1 and
56 stage2?" Is there a way to do an install without stage3?
57
58 >
59 > (the next one is more of a Portage change)
60 > * Have some warning banners on ~arch and a toggle option for
61 > make.conf to disable them. There are *far* too many people
62 > on IRC suggesting newbies adopt ~arch, and they do so.. :(
63 > They've got no clue what it means, then they bitch/whine
64 > when they hit ABI issues or other problems and blame Gentoo.
65 > Don't document the toggle option in the Install Manual ;)
66
67 Well, I'm certainly in favor of disabling it on the LiveCD/DVD
68 installer! While you're at it, force everyone to take i686 and -O2 along
69 with not getting ~arch on the installer. In other words, force them to
70 what they'd get if they installed networkless. Hell, you might as well
71 force them to take ext3 filesystems, since they're the only ones that
72 really work. ;)
73
74 Those few times I've installed a new box from the LiveCD/DVD, I've
75 always done it networkless anyhow. That way, I get the box on the air in
76 a short time and *then* I can indulge my inner ricer. :)
77
78 > Suggested value for disabling the big flashy warning banners :P
79 > MODIFYING_ACCEPT_KEYWORDS_MAY_BREAK_MY_BOX_AND_I_UNDERSTAND_THIS
80
81 Yep ... fine with me.
82
83
84 --
85 gentoo-releng@l.g.o mailing list

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