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

[Ben de Groot]

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.)

-- 
Cheers,

Ben | yngwin
Gentoo developer