Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 01:19:52 +0000 George Prowse <cokehabit@×××××.com>
wrote:
> What on earth is going to be a "major visible improvement" to a
> command line based package manager that any average Gentoo user is
> going to realise? The average user probably only uses a few commands:
> emerge -u/p/a/v/--sync/package/world/system and then use
> package.keywords/mask/unmask so there are really no fundamental
> differences that the average user will notice

If you think that that's all a package manager should do, you have a
serious lack of imagination. Most users need or would heavily benefit
from far more. See http://ciaranm.org/show_post/95 for some modest
ideas that have turned out to be useful.

> And that really means that portage is no easier/harder than it was 3
> years ago when USE="~x86" emerge foo was consigned to the dustbin

Except that now users have to deal with more like a thousand installed
packages, and have no sane way of doing simple things like:

* Unmasking everything needed to get a particular KDE release in one go
* Uninstalling a package along with its now-unused dependencies
* Uninstalling a package along with everything depending upon it

Why should these things be difficult?

> > Sunrise is the canonical example. Also consider the way the forums
> > are being run (like it or not, the forums are taken by many to be
> > representative of Gentoo's user base)...
> >
> It seems to most that the forums is the only part of Gentoo that is -
> and always has been - running smoothly

Smoothly is not productively or effectively.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh
Mail                                : ciaranm at ciaranm.org
Web                                 : http://ciaranm.org/
Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/

-- 
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list