Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Making systemd more accessible to "normal" users

[Tom Wijsman]

On Wed, 22 May 2013 03:06:05 +0000 (UTC)
Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@×××.net> wrote:

> And a knife or hammer can be used to murder or commit suicide as
> well; that doesn't mean they're bad tools, it means the user is
> misusing them.

The amount of users misusing a knife or hammer is much lower than the
amount of users misusing INSTALL_MASK. And even if you want to use it
as an example, murdering is only bad when you consider it to be bad.

Anyhow, the knife and hammer aren't the best tools around to do it as
your target will have a high chance of surviving. Unless you target
people that don't defend themselves, all you make is a few scratches.

> There's more advanced knives and hammers too, but you don't have to
> procure the most expensive one to do the job.

You do, because better tools cost more effort.

> In some cases, even a heavy screwdriver can be used as a hammer, if
> that's what you have in your hand and the hammer's down the ladder in
> the toolbox.

It's this kind of lazyness that ends up breaking things.

> > In other Package managers, I assume this madness isn't supported.
>
> That might be part of why I don't use other PMs...

But other users do, because Portage isn't perfect.
 
> > In its current state, it certainly has its use cases; though it is
> > often misused by unaware users that don't know what removal of
> > certain files has as a consequence, that means it can do more bad
> > than good...
> >
> >  [1]: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-670094.html
> >       First INSTALL_MASK I came across searching for it online,
> >       particularly masking *.h, *.pc and Makefile* are very bad
> > ideas.
>
> Did you read the use case?  He is (was, that was 2008) doing the
> builds for his 2GB drive netbook on different build system, then
> doing binpkg installs on the netbook.  In that case, INSTALL_MASKING
> those filetypes for installation to the netbook, where he has no
> intention of doing any building anyway, makes quite a lot of sense.

A good lesson is that people don't actually read all that stuff, those
that are looking for values for INSTALL_MASK will often just try it for
themselves only to see these dangerous values fail and start bothering
them. Or they may not know it's because of their INSTALL_MASK that they
need to reinstall their system some time later.

Historically, ricing other settings like the CFLAGS in make.conf is a
quite good example of why this file is a red herring; it took quite
some time for the concept of SAFE CFLAGS to get some attention. That's
why SAFE INSTALL MASKS is amongst one of the suggestions I made in the
earlier reply; people on an embedded profile could mask these files,
other people cannot unless they _explicitly_ unmask the ability to mask.

> In fact, I have a netbook (tho it has a much larger 100+ gig drive)
> and could use the idea myself (altho currently I don't run a PM at
> all on the netbook, instead rsyncing from the build image on the main
> machine, so I'd have to modify his use case... or mine... somewhat).

Not running a PM makes this paragraph irrelevant to this discussion.

> As for people misusing the available tools, gentoo has always taken
> the position that we make the tools available and document how to use
> them, but we aren't a babysitting or handholding distro, and if
> handholding is what people want/need, they better look elsewhere as
> gentoo's simply not in that market, and doesn't pretend to be.

We do babysitting / handholding where we can, the _right_ amount of it.

Not bringing out news or supporting people with the udev upgrade, that
would've cost us people; not working on options that make systemd work,
that would've cost us people. Not pointing to solutions for the recent
automake errors / genkernel blocker, that would've cost us people.

Let's not sacrifice part of our user base by taking a wrong decision;
developing a distro goes much further than "let's just use this hack",
until multiple people agree a hack to be the best short term solution.

Go consistently make the worst tools available, we'll talk again then.

-- 
With kind regards,

Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
Gentoo Developer

E-mail address  : TomWij@g.o
GPG Public Key  : 6D34E57D
GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2  ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D