Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: CD drive opening on boot!!

[Lie Ryan]

On 12/24/2009 9:07 AM, Duncan wrote:
> Lie Ryan posted on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:08:48 +1100 as excerpted:
>
>> IMO Gentoo's edge was not about having the most cutting edge software
>> (pun not intended), but rather "having a choice". With Gentoo, you get
>> to choose which USE-flag to (not) include; you got to choose the kernel
>> options and also to use genkernel; then you've got a choice to run a
>> antiquated, full-stable, half-stable, ~arch, or overlay; you are free to
>> choose how antiquated or cutting edge you want your system to be. And
>> Gentoo's portage makes living the picky eater's life much easier than if
>> you have to compile packages and its dependencies manually to separate
>> the vegetables (or meats if you're a vegetarian; or pork if you're a
>> Muslim; or cows if you're a Hindi; or whatever taboo or personal
>> distrust you have).
>
> You're right about the choice, of course, but... well, the whole kde3
> thing has nicely illustrated the issues stable gentooers have.
>
> To this day I'd not call kde4 ready for stable yet, and CERTAINLY not as
> stable and usable as kde-3.5.10.  4.4 should be getting close, I expect
> it'll be like a release candidate traditionally is, it could be stable if
> it had to be, but there's a few more bugs they want to kill before it's
> fully released.  4.3 is late beta, 4.2 was early beta, a LOT of SERIOUS
> bugs still hanging around, 4.1 was post-freeze alpha, and 4.0... was very
> early technology demo, mostly prototype, from a user perspective.

well, I usually used GNOME, so I more-or-less missed the KDE chaos 
(though I heard them often).

> That's not the sort of thing stable users enjoy, for sure.  Really,
> neither do they tend to enjoy the constant updates Gentoo has, changing
> their work environment out from under them.  Good Gentooers soon learn
> that if they're updating less than once a month, the updates DO pile up,
> and the process DOES get rough.  By three months, an upgrade gets
> difficult and stressfull, by six months, it's getting easier to start
> from a brand new stage-3, by a year, which is what Gentoo /does/ /try/ to
> support, a brand new stage-3 is generally going to be much easier than
> the exotic bugs you'll get trying to update in place.  Yet stable users
> normally /want/ their stuff stable for a year or more, and expect no
> serious problems on update within their release slot, even a year or more
> out.  The all-at-one-time release upgrade, OTOH, is assumed to be the
> normal case.  Meanwhile, gentoo support for stale packages disappears
> rather soon, relatively, and users are forced into either not updating
> any more (no security updates) or upgrading.  The enterprise/LTS
> distribution releases at least have a support timeclock that people can
> schedule their computing life around.

On that point, I'd agree with you. Gentoo users have either the choice of:
1) keeping up with the rolling update every day, either the rolling 
stable or ~arch tree or a mix
2) update every 2-3 years from stage 3

but you can't update every 6-months or so with Gentoo; not smoothly 
enough. That's one thing missing from Gentoo's choice; don't know if 
anyone misses it though. Most fully stable users are in server 
environment and would go to choice #1 while most desktop/laptop users 
would use their computer everyday to keep up with daily updates. That 
sort of implies people that only uses their computer occasionally (once 
or twice a month?) is not suitable for Gentoo. Those kind of users 
aren't really Gentoo's target users, so I doubt there is a significant 
portion of people that fell into this third category.

> As I mentioned above, it took the kde3/4 fiasco to really open my eyes to
> this, but open them it most certainly did!  Generally speaking,
> enterprise and debian stable are the only ones supporting kde3 still,
> even tho kde4 isn't yet ready to fill its shoes for production machines.
>
>> For me, I run a mostly stable system and unmasks a few packages that I
>> used most frequently since those are the software that I have the time
>> to test thoroughly since I work with them all the time. I've been
>> running a python 3 overlay (very unstable at that time), but I'm not
>> willing to run a full ~arch since most of those software I don't use
>> often enough anyway.
>
> Of course, that's where Gentoo excels.  It gives you the choice and
> ability to do just that, even if it's not that well supported.  But in
> fact, because it's so easy

Put that *because it's so easy* in bold; gentoo's portage makes such 
setup easy, your "choice" is never limited by tools that is hard-coded 
to makes such setup difficult to manage.

> and so necessary for stable users at times,
> there's /enough/ people doing it, that it generally works out
> /reasonably/ well.

that's why I love the easy part.