Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems

[Rob C]

On 14/03/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb@×××××××.net> wrote:
>
> Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 19:30:37 +0100 Alexandre Buisse
> > <nattfodd@g.o> wrote:
> >
> >> I quite agree with the Patriot act comparison, and I would be
> >> interested to know what you think our real problems are.
> >>
> >
> > Not a complete list, but probably a good starting point:
> >
> > * Portage. Gentoo hasn't delivered anything useful or cool for two
> > years or so. Things like layman are merely workarounds for severe
> > Portage limitations (not a criticism of layman). Delivery to end users
> > is based around what's possible with Portage, not what people want or
> > need. In the mean time, managing a Gentoo system has become much more
> > complicated due to the increased number of packages on a typical system
> > and the increased requirements for the average user. Combined with
> > serious improvements in the competition, Gentoo's benefits are rapidly
> > diminishing. Until there's a general admission that Portage is severely
> > holding Gentoo back, anything delivered by Gentoo will be far below
> > what could really be done.
> >
> > It's been claimed that Gentoo lacks direction. It's more accurate to
> > say that the inability to change Portage prevents Gentoo from going
> > anywhere. That small interface improvements can be passed off as a big
> > deal and that users get excited over minor config file tweaks is
> > indicative of how low people's expectations really are.
> >
> > I don't claim to know everything that users want from the package
> > manager. I know that everything in [1] has been described by at least
> > one user as a major advantage for not using Portage. Unfortunately,
> > most of these aren't things that can be delivered easily with the
> > current codebase.
> >
> > (Incidentally, since someone will probably try this argument: I held
> > these beliefs long before I started work on a Portage alternative.)
> >
> Well, I assume most everyone on this list has read the blog post about
> Gentoo being unsuitable for servers. If not, I can hunt it down, but
> it's a starting point for discussions about Portage and package
> managers. I'll just throw out a couple of my own comments:
>
> 1. As far as I'm concerned, the one thing that absolutely positively
> should have happened now but hasn't is some scheme where you have
> something like Red Hat/Fedora's "green checkmark/red bang" indicator on
> your desk, indicating whether your system is up to date, and a
> classification of the available updates into security, bug fixes and
> enhancements. I don't ever remember how long Red Hat has had that, and I
> know Debian and the other apt-based package managers have something
> similar, even if it's just a command-line level. On Gentoo, even with
> the latest Portage, I do "emerge --sync; emerge -puvDN world" and just
> get a list. There's no way to tell which of those are must-haves for
> security without reading changelogs.
>
> 2. Just last year, the organization that is developing the LSB (Linux
> Standard Base) standards got around to forming a working group on
> package management. Bluntly put, everybody's package management sucks in
> some way or another, and there are three major Linux package management
> systems (RPM, apt and Portage) in addition to Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP
> and R all having their own package management systems. But ... the Red
> Hat/RPM/yum folks were there ... the Debian/Ubuntu/apt folks were there
> ... and I think the Perl and Python people were there ... Gentoo wasn't!
> There doesn't seem to be any Gentoo representation on the Linux
> Standards Base at all! So a "standard Linux" will end up being some
> usable compromise between Red Hat/Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu, Novell/SuSE,
> Perl/CPAN, Apache, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Python and PHP.
> > * Similarly, the belief that Portage defines Gentoo and represents a
> > lot of work. The tree defines Gentoo, and contains far more code than a
> > mere package manager.
> >
> The tree, like an ordinary tree, is a complex adaptive system, including
> code, developers and users. I obviously don't have the same insight as a
> developer, but I think it's in pretty good shape. As near as I can tell,
> it's second only to Debian in terms of its size. There may be more RPMs
> world-wide than there are .debs or ebuilds, but they *aren't* all
> together in one place.
> > * The wrong idea of what the user base is, and what the target user
> > base is. Gentoo's direction is too heavily influenced by a small number
> > of extremely noisy ricer forum users, many of whom don't even run
> > Gentoo. Unfortunately, this self-perpetuating clique wields huge
> > amounts of influence.
> >
> You may not know what the user base is, but you can probably get a
> pretty good idea of how *large* it is relative to Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian
> and openSuSE by doing some simple web page hit statistics research using
> publicly-available tools and data. And I think you'll be amazed at how
> small that base is. Distrowatch was right about that part -- Gentoo
> "share of mind" is dropping and dropping rapidly, although I don't think
> it's because of misbehavior in the community. I think it's because:
>
> a. Daniel Robbins left and went to Microsoft, leaving no "Mr. Gentoo", and
> b. No effort to seek corporate support, at least none that I'm aware of.
>
> In short, I'm not sure there is any future for *any* "pure community
> distro". Somehow Gentoo needs to at least find a marketable defendable
> niche and some kind of corporate sponsorship. Maybe embedded will turn
> out to be that niche -- I'd love to have even 1/4 of Portage on
> something like a Zaurus or "iPhone".
>
> --
> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
> http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/
>
> If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given
> rabbits fire.
>
> --
> gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list
>
> I'm tired, so I didn't read your whole email Ed, I will do tomorrow first
thing, I promise!

In response to your first point though, you may want to have a look at
'glsa-check' if your running an anywhere close to recent version of portage
you should find that its already installed.

Anyway, goodnight dev list


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