Re: [gentoo-dev] preference concerns over "gentoo-ization" of packages

[Troy Dack]

On Sun, 2003-09-28 at 23:08, Jason Wever wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Sep 2003 22:54:11 -0400
> Aron Griffis <agriffis@g.o> wrote:
>
> > Anyway, I think it really comes down to the decision of the developers
> > maintaining the ebuilds.  They're the ones in the best situation to
> > choose whether and how a package should be modified for inclusion into
> > Gentoo.
>
> Well, one of the reasons I brought up this concern comes from
> http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/about.xml
>
> In the Larry The Cow poster/image it says;
> "He discovered lots of up-to-date packages that could be auto-built using
> the optimization settings and build-time functionality that he wanted,
> rather than what some distro creator thought would be best for him."
>
> I would assume from this that packages would be installed without
> distro customization.   Granted this doesn't say we won't change the
> default behavior of programs, but I think it's a logical conclusion based
> on the above quote from the website.

I can understand where you are coming from.  However I think that since
the Gentoo user base has grown substantially, both in actually numbers
and also in the level of Linux proficiency, I think that it is a good
thing that Gentoo developers are slightly customising the installation
of applications.

Not everybody is a Linux boffin and Gentoo is attracting its fair share
of Linux initiates. Having things configured so that a package works
straight away or so that the configuration doesn't shoot users in the
foot (or have the potential to cause grief for other users) is sensible.

Having said that, those that do wish true customisation can still
perform all of the steps manually using 'ebuild' and set any
configuration options that they wish in that manner.  The flexibility is
still there.

Just my humble opinion.

-- 
Troy Dack		Gentoo moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and
tad@g.o		look around once in awhile, you could miss out.

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