[gentoo-dev] Re: [RFC] Rebooting the Installer Project

[Duncan]

Andrew Savchenko posted on Tue, 21 Jul 2015 19:08:43 +0300 as excerpted:

> n Tue, 21 Jul 2015 09:10:52 -0500 J.Rutkowski wrote:
>> The problem I have with using Sabayon to ultimately install Gentoo is
>> it takes way too much work than just doing a Gentoo install...
>
> You missed my point.  [...] I'm interested in fast bootstrapping
> from "here your box" to "you need to have this work done". Of course
> proper configuration and fine tuning will require time, but this should
> be done later, not right away.
>
>> You would have to uninstall all entropy applications
>
> If this is supported using emerge --depclean or some other tool present
> in the distribution, this is fine.

AFAIK (again, after some digging in the docs but not having actually done 
it myself), that's about what it is.  I suspect they have entropy pre-
added to @world, so a depclean by itself wouldn't do it, but I'm almost 
sure I recall specifically seeing something in the switching-to-portage 
docs about unmerging entropy.

>> and begin using just portage [...]
>
> I will have to rebuild kernel, @system and @world anyway, even with GRS
> installation.
>
>> remove overlay and rebuild all over again, and then hunt down the rest
>> of the Sabayon-specific files.
>
> This what is bothers me. Are they leftovers outside of portage control?

One of the big pluses is that as the front page mentions, sabayon really 
does support and consider a bullet-point feature the ability to switch to 
portage and a normal gentoo ~amd64 system.  IOW...

* It is all both well documented and won't get you the evil eye if you 
actually ask questions on their forums/IRC/whatever about it, as it 
really is a bullet-point feature.

And apparently enough people are actually using the sabayon2gentoo 
feature that it's well tested, and any problems are most likely of the 
~amd64 type (IOW, the latest ~amd64 version, just introduced yesterday, 
threw a new curve into things, that the documentation hasn't had a chance 
to catch up to yet) that many gentooers are already quite used to dealing 
with.

But that said, I had forgotten about calculate, and knew less about it in 
the first place.  From the posts of others, that looks to be a more 
direct install from binaries, switch to gentoo from sources, method.  Tho 
it does seem to be somewhat less well known, and thus probably has a 
smaller user base, so the calculate2gentoo path may be less well traveled 
than the sabayon2gentoo path, and documentation and support might thus 
not be as good.

I'd actually look at both, if I were in the market for something like 
that.

Meanwhile, lest the point have been missed in my previous post, I really 
do believe gentoo can and should reach out to other gentoo-based distros, 
and all distros in the community can and should be directly supporting 
each other and referring users to each other when they're a better fit 
for the specific use-case.  It's possible some may not want it (IOW ask 
first), but for those that do, I could even envision the early sections 
of the handbook where people are choosing what they want and how they 
want to install, linking directly to these sister distros both as quick-
install methods and for those who sort of like the idea of gentoo, but 
aren't quite ready to jump into the full from-source thing just yet, tho 
they might want an easy way to get ready so they can do it later if they 
decide to.  At least sabayon (and I'd suppose calculate as well) already 
encourages those who wish to, to switch directly to gentoo, and both 
mentions and links gentoo resources in its documentation, and it'd be 
very nice if gentoo was willing to return the favor. After all, we're on 
the same team, and as I've pointed out to other users in the past, 
there's no lost face in simply deciding gentoo isn't right for you at 
this point, and that some other distro is a better match.  If we can 
point them at a gentoo-based distro, they'll at least still be in the 
ecosystem, and who knows, when their needs change, they may well be 
back.  =:^)

-- 
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