Re: [gentoo-releng] USE flags and stages 1 and 2

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Mon, 2005-10-31 at 17:32 -0500, Michael Crute wrote:
> On 10/31/05, Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@g.o> wrote:
>         > Another thought would be an approach similar to the
>         installer irc
>         > channel where you have to read through a really long FAQ
>         before you
>         > are told how to download the stage1 or 2 tarballs.
>
>         My personal impression is that this will piss off the end
>         user.  This
>         works for the installer *channel* but would never work for a
>         CD
>         installation.  It's simply asinine to ask the user to jump
>         through hoops
>         to do what they want.
>
> Well I wasn't really referring to a CD (but in this case read the MS
> license agreement when installing Windoze I think that would be the
> equivalent of this :). What I was really referring to was putting up
> some sort of scenario like that to download the stage1/2 tarballs.

Like I said, alienating users isn't the best idea for future growth.

>         Even if we stopped shipping stage1 tarballs, there's nothing
>         stopping
>         some inventive user from grabbing a stage3 tarball and making
>         a stage1
>         tarball from it using catalyst.  It only takes a couple hours
>         on a
>         decent machine.
>
> True but if they fire up catalyst to make a stage1 chances are they
> aren't going to be so dumb as to request support when their use flag
> combinations don't work. The problem is ignorant users and most of
> them can't us catalyst.

Exactly.  That was my entire point.  If they're taking the time and
energy to build the stage themselves, perhaps they would understand some
of the issues and would be better educated.

Consider it a very high barrier of entry on the ability to be able to do
something extremely dumb with your system.

We don't put reiser4 tools on our CD, either.  Why should we put stage1
on there?  Personally, I believe a stage1 to be much more dangerous and
time-wasting for us developers and our users than reiser4.

>         My point is that once again, we're not *really* removing
>         choice even if
>         we were to drop the earlier stages altogether, we're just
>         making the
>         user do the work themselves and removing one more abysmal
>         headache and
>         QA nightmare from our already enormous and growing list of
>         stuff that
>         has been delaying the past few releases well beyond our
>         scheduled
>         release dates.
>
> Regardless of how foolish you may think it is to do a stage1 install
> (and it may well be) I would still greatly appreciate the stage1
> tarballs even if you refuse to support them. Personally I have never
> needed support on a stage1 that I couldn't get by simply RTFM.

I see no reason whatsoever to release anything that we refuse to
support.  It doesn't speak much on our professionalism or our quality if
we're willing to put out release media that we won't support.

I would much rather not release them and deal with the potential flames
and blowback from a user community that has been wrongly trained that
the stage1 tarball is a good thing than to release something completely
unsupported.  All that does is raise more user->developer relations
problems and widens the gap between users and developers.

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