Re: [gentoo-project] improving alternative PM support in gentoo

[hasufell]

On 08/17/2015 09:26 AM, Ben de Groot wrote:
> On 16 August 2015 at 01:24, hasufell <hasufell@g.o> wrote:
>> My aim would be that all our main support channels like #gentoo, the
>> user mailing lists, the forums and so on treat user discussions
>> regarding alternative package managers in (almost) the same way as Portage.
>
> Since most Gentoo users (and I include the developers here) have
> little to no experience with those alternatives, they can't be
> expected to answer specific support questions about them. Of course we
> can always refer to our wiki, and apply general principles (PMS in the
> case of package manager functioning).
>
>> That also means that we would have to integrate these alternatives in
>> our documentation, hopefully the official one. Because I think our
>> official documentation should discuss package managers in the same way
>> it discusses file systems. So, it is fine to recommend e.g. Portage and
>> ext4 as the main examples, but we should also mention zfs, btrfs,
>> Paludis, Pkgcore (when it catches up) and so on.
>> In the case of Paludis, the upstream documentation[4] is quite technical
>> and doesn't give a concise enough introduction for Gentoo beginners, who
>> want to follow a step-by-step guide. Because of that, I have written up
>> such a guide and proposed it to be included in the official Gentoo
>> handbook[5][6].
>
> The wiki is now our official documentation, and there is plenty of
> space for any guides you wish to add.
>
> But I would like to keep the Handbook as such simple. It is
> overwhelming enough as it is, for newcomers, so let's not overload it
> with explanations of alternatives. I think we should just offer one
> default path, and point to alternatives that are documented in other
> parts of the wiki. (This should also be done, for example, with the
> part about LILO.)
>

I know several users and Gentoo developers who have experience with
those alternatives. I'm not sure any of us has numbers, though.

The problem is not only the lack of documentation, but also that those
users sometimes get shut down in official support channels when they
want to help other users who are asking about these alternatives. That
is something we need to improve if we don't want to lose our face as a
meta-distribution (which we fought for with openrc/systemd and so on).

The best way to improve this is to make it part of the handbook, for
various reasons. The handbook is already part of the wiki. I think it is
the right place to introduce users to sensible (not random) choices.
That is what the handbook already does, starting at network setup, over
to disk partitioning and kernel configuration. All these choices are
important and vital parts of your system you want to configure. In the
case of a PM, you will want it configured and set up as early as
possible in your installation procedure.

These choices are not cluttering the handbook, but are clearly
distinguished with prefixes like "Optional: " or "Alternative: ", so the
user knows he can skip that if he wants. The point I can see is that we
could improve usability on the wiki side, by having alternative sections
hidden by default for example.

I don't think users will like to go through a default installation and
realize later on they have to revert/migrate half of it (which can take
a long time for PM configuration), because they wanted different system
tools, which were not part of the handbook.