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

[Duncan]

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.

OTOH, with the new name and focus on devs, KDE SC /is/ really aimed at 
devs, NOT end users, with the included apps really being developer demos, 
and the kde4 versioning and kde 4.2 stability claims /does/ more 
accurately reflect that -- it's just too bad they did the versioning so 
long before they announced their target audience change, as a lot of 
users were deceived into thinking it was ready for them...

But be the upstream issues what they may, the problem for most 
distribution users including Gentoo users (and devs, BTW) is that support 
for the stable and production-ready version, kde3, ran out WAAYYYY before 
the next version, kde4, was similarly stable and production ready.

"Oh, but there's the kde-sunset overlay."

Yes, but it's officially user-only supported, that is gentoo-dev 
unsupported, because kde3 is unsupported upstream, as is the qt3 it's 
built upon, and there's no gentoo-devs interested in taking on the 
responsibility of continued support under those circumstances.  That's 
not the sort of support stable users tend to be looking for.

Meanwhile, the LTS/enterprise releases still have another year or more of 
kde3 coverage, as that's what was stable and shipping when their LTS 
product shipped (bar Ubuntu, of course, since they didn't ship an LTS 
kubuntu precisely because they foresaw exactly this sort of issues coming 
up, despite all the claims of continued support from kde at the time, 
claims that turned out to be worthless, for the ordinary distribution 
user -- but in hind sight kde was even then already refocusing their 
targetting, and weren't talking about the ordinary user any more).

But back on the topic of Gentoo.  Gentoo is and always has been a rolling 
upgrade community distribution, that reasonably closely follows 
upstream.  When upstream drops support, Gentoo, without the resources of 
the enterprise/corporate distributions, has little choice but to 
ultimately drop support as well.  Sure, the packages stay in-tree for 
awhile sometimes, but they don't actually build with modern gcc against 
modern system libs, and eventually, treecleaners or someone notices, and 
they get pulled.

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.

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 and so necessary for stable users at times, 
there's /enough/ people doing it, that it generally works out 
/reasonably/ well.  But still, tho the problems will be a bit different, 
I don't think running all ~arch is much different in overall problems 
than partial, or indeed, all stable, because if nothing else, hardware 
updates tend to bite all-stable people harder than all ~arch people, and 
also because stable /is/ a bit stale at times, and it's simply hard to 
remember what the fix was for that problem that happened over a year ago.

I know I've certainly experienced that myself, running the kernel rcs, 
when the release is what goes ~arch, and stable is generally a release 
behind that.  So when folks ask about kernel problems on the brand new 
stable kernel they're just upgrading to now, it's typically six months or 
more since I encountered the same issue, and I've often long since 
forgotten the details, as I'm on to newer and different problems.  The 
full release would seem to be about right, I'd think, for most users not 
wishing to push the edge, as it's at least new enough the edge pushers 
still remember the issues and how to fix them, while being old enough the 
big issues all generally have fairly well known solutions.  If I'm not 
mistaken (I run direct linus kernels and don't touch gentoo's kernel 
distribution at all, tho I know when they go stable since I follow the 
dev list and see the announcements/warnings there), current release is 
what gets ~arched for at least ~x86 and ~amd64 on Gentoo, so that's what 
I'd think would be about the best place to be, on a package I happen to 
follow reasonably closely, upstream.  Similarly for a couple others I 
follow reasonably closely upstream.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman