Re: [gentoo-user] Giving Gentoo Another Go

[Neil Bothwick]

On Thu, 17 Mar 2016 23:03:47 -0400, Hunter Jozwiak wrote:

> After talking to a few diehard Gentoo fans at my local LUG, I decided I
> would like to give Gentoo another shot. Are there any good books that
> can supplement the Gentoo handbook

The Gentoo handbook really is the book. It's written by Gentoo devs so it
is always up to date, something that cannot always be said of print books
(a friend of mine wrote the Haynes Manual on Ubuntu some years ago,
few months later they released Unity!).

> as well as books that go more in
> depth than the Gentoo chapter on Portage?

The main mistake that people make with the Gentoo Handbook is that they
follow it carefully through installation, then stop. They have only read
chapter 1. The rest of the handbook, along with the Gentoo Wiki provide a
lot more information.

> One of the main issues I
> faced with Gentoo when I first tried it is that I did not understand
> the power of package.use, and I put everything in to make.conf.

No one gets it right first time, there are many choices and many ways of
doing things. No book can tell you which way is right for you, only
experience can do that. Getting things like this wrong is a natural part
of the Gentoo learning experience.

You will develop your way of doing things over time, and that way could
change as your needs do. Using your example of package.use, moving USE
flags from package.use to make.conf is an easy enough task if you need to
change. I tend to put them n package.use to start with then migrate to
make.conf if I find I am using the same flag on several packages. There's
also the choice of whether you make package.use (and its friends) and
make.conf a single file or a directory of files. Ask in here and you will
find proponents of both approaches, but it's an organisational choice,
whichever works for you is best.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

"Mmmm, trouble with grammer have I, yes?" - Yoda