Re: [gentoo-catalyst] Some easy sugestions to implement, I hope

[Stephen L. Ulmer]

Disclaimer:

I am not a Gentoo developer; I have never been one; It is unlikely
that I will ever be one. All of these opinions are my own. 


On 29 Mar 2007, nelson_batalha@×××××××.com spake:
>> Catalyst builds are not supposed to be *interactive*. If you are
>> hitting these problems, you're doing something wrong and/or
>> stupid. Most of the time, getting blockers is a result of using an
>> old stage3 seed to build a livecd with a newer snapshot.
>
> Actually some of them actually were bugs in the ebuilds, though most
> errors I had were when I didn't knew of the package.use bug. Take
> this one http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172622

Bugs in ebuilds are why the release engineering team is very careful
about what snapshots they use when building releases.

> Even if they are not supposed to be interactive, is there a good
> reason for not allowing that? I think large emerges often results in
> errors, no matter what stage3 seed is used. Besides, many emerges
> are so much easier with interaction right? Take
> http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-539520.html

In order for a release of any system to be "high quality", it's build
process must first be "repeatable". That is, you should be able to
take the same set of inputs and produce the same result -- this is a
trivial requirement of the scientific method.  Interactivity does not
lend itself to repeatability. That is, things usually work better when a
human is not one of the inputs. ;)

If you are finding yourself needing interactivity in Catalyst, then
you should step back and examine your process. If you've had to "help"
catalyst with more than just configuration directives, then you likely
don't have a "pure" result.

I often have to re-try a build several times because of whacky Portage
behavior or broken ebuilds, but because of pkgcache, ccache, and
kerncache I rarely ever feel penalized for it. In fact, the most I
usually have to do is *erase* selected items from the cache to force a
rebuild. Only on very limited occasions have I had to mess with an
"in-flight" build, and probably not at all since catalyst 2.x.

Having been a professional swiss-army-geek my entire adult life, I've
developed rather strong opinions about process control, software
packaging, and system administration. I have to say that, for the most
part, I think the Catalyst guys have the right idea.

-- 
Stephen