Re: [gentoo-releng] Re: Free-standing Portage / Recent stage3 tarballs / Beta

[Alex Howells]

On 04/02/2008, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb@×××××××.net> wrote:
> Alex Howells wrote:
> > I wasn't attempting to state "This does not work!"; merely expressing
> > that ~arch isn't really a supported platform. Dropping back to stable
> > isn't really a viable route, once your system is ~arch there's quite a
> > lot to go <BOOM!> if you tried to globally undo that.  Wanna try it?
> > ;)
>
> I've never had to, but yes, it's nearly impossible.

.. and this is why I think there should be big warning signs :)

> Gentoo in the enterprise? Nobody ever got fired for buying RHEL or
> Novell SuSE. It's possible Ubuntu will get to that point someday, but
> you aren't going to see a "pure community" distro like Gentoo, Debian,
> or even Fedora any place where there's even a whiff of risk aversion.
> Enterprise IT departments want to be able to call up a sales rep and
> threaten to quit buying if the vendor doesn't come in and fix stuff *now*!

I actually know of several server farms and supercomputers which run
it right now, and I know plenty of universities with 1000+ systems
deployed too; my alma mater uses very basic installs of Gentoo Linux
for X11 to connect to Citrix, it works very well, is easy to update en
masse, etc. They've got a mixture of Solaris 10 and Gentoo deployed on
servers too.

Maybe I'm being incorrect when classing 'enterprise' as start-ups, but
I wasn't excluding them from my previous statement - what I'd like is
increased adoption in business generally, we already see some shops
running Gentoo Linux because they've realized their "in house" guys
are just as good as the some of the chaps on RHELs support line. ;)

> > I'd have liked to see two main things happen with Gentoo 2008.0:
> >
> >    *  Get rid of stage3 - all our install documentation works with
> >       just the stage3 right now, we don't "support" stage1/2
> >       installs yet users are /always/ asking on IRC and MLs
> >       for help with a stage1 install because they think it's l33t.
> >       Remove it from mirrors, put it in /experimental, whatever;
> >       we need the stage1/2 somewhere for lotsa reasons, but lets
> >       make it less obvious to weed out those clueless ricers.
>
> Did you mean to say "get rid of stage3" or "get rid of stage1 and
> stage2?" Is there a way to do an install without stage3?

I meant stop shipping stage1 and stage2 in the releases directory.
Already it's not mentioned in documentation, but it's presence in the
place we tell folks to download stuff from makes people go, "I wanna
do that! l33t!".

There are only a few corner cases where you *should* install from
stage1, notably if you want to significantly alter the bootstrap
process.  Given how stage3 gets 'out of date' pretty fast after a
release due to us having a fairly dynamic tree though, if you wanted
to make core changes, it's going to be just as fast (and 10x more
supported) to emerge -e world.

That leaves:

    *  Ship 'em in /experimental to all our mirrors
    *  Keep 'em on one of our Infra boxes at $sponsor

Don't think there's much between those choices, given stage1+2
shouldn't really need to be downloaded a great deal. In terms of
traffic volume, the biggest 'hit' seems to be folks downloading
LiveCDs + stage3.

> >    *  Have some warning banners on ~arch and a toggle option for
> >       make.conf to disable them.  There are *far* too many people
> >       on IRC suggesting newbies adopt ~arch, and they do so.. :(
> >       They've got no clue what it means, then they bitch/whine
> >       when they hit ABI issues or other problems and blame Gentoo.
> >       Don't document the toggle option in the Install Manual ;)
[snip..]
> >    Suggested value for disabling the big flashy warning banners :P
> >    MODIFYING_ACCEPT_KEYWORDS_MAY_BREAK_MY_BOX_AND_I_UNDERSTAND_THIS
>
> Yep ... fine with me.

I'm not suggesting we remove flexibility here, just make it *very*
obvious when you might be doing something daft.  If power users want
to run ~arch with XFS on a desktop system that doesn't have a UPS,
they're stupid, but we shouldn't restrain them from doing that :)
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