Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: news item: changes to stages (make.conf and make.profile)

[Michael Mol]

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 7:39 AM, Fabian Groffen <grobian@g.o> wrote:
> On 24-07-2012 07:20:31 -0400, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Fabian Groffen <grobian@g.o> wrote:
>> > I don't know about general consensus.  In my opinion, it's plain spam to
>> > existing users.  (And that would IMO be the xth news item in a row to be
>> > spam.)
>>
>> Can't say I agree here.  Some news items have been more useful than
>> others, but I doubt the typical Gentoo user (who does not subscribe to
>> -dev) would think that many of the past messages have been spam.
>
> Ok.  This is subjective.
>
>> Long-time Gentoo users aren't going to notice in the handbook that the
>> location of /etc/make.conf has moved - I know that if I'm doing an
>> install I tend to use the handbook as a checklist but I skim through
>> it so fast that I doubt I'd notice a big change.  They're going to
>> appreciate a heads-up.  The only people who wouldn't consider it news
>> are those following this list, and judging by the state of this thread
>> you'll already have read 40 posts on the topic, so the 41st won't be
>> that big of a deal.
>
> Long-time Gentoo users either 1) don't reinstall systems that often (why
> would they?), or 2) know that things every once in a while change.
>
> IMO, with 1) you'd expect that user to read the docs again when doing a
> new install.  With 2) they already figured out when they did a new
> install that /etc/make.conf was not there, however putting something in
> a file out there did work as expected as well.

As a user who's done a lot of reinstalling this year, I can offer a
couple observations:

1) The handbook contains a barebones make.conf, just as it comes with
a number of other barebones configuration files. You probably don't
need to supply a make.conf file, since the barebones version is only a
few lines.
1a) I have to think that things like CHOST could be set somewhere
higher up, and only overridden in make.conf. Similarly, if there's a
round-robin DNS entry for GENTOO_MIRRORS, that could be defaulted,
too.

2) Once I got to the point where I was frequently reinstalling, I
started copying and tweaking make.conf files from working systems
rather than doing a full rebuild.

3) That news item about udev-181 and a unified /usr is still greeting
new users...and it's still claiming an unmask of 2012-03-19, which is
three months ago. It's quite confusing in that it claims an event is
going to occur, in the past, and it still hasn't occurred.

>
> From a different angle, perhaps stage3s shouldn't include a default
> /etc/make.conf at all.  Would solve this issue nicely, and doesn't
> require a news item at all, IMO.

From the perspective of a user who often deals with the install
process, and occasionally helps others with it, I think this is could
be very good.


-- 
:wq