Re: [gentoo-releng] USE flags and stages 1 and 2

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Mon, 2005-10-31 at 13:43 -0800, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Well ... at one time, Gentoo *was* about choice, but it's evolved to
> being about quality IMHO. As long as you're willing to make all the
> stage3 tarballs required, I see no reason to continue to support stage1
> installs. The past couple of installs I did were stage1 -- I wanted to
> see how long it took, among other things. And I've never done a stage2
> ... I've never seen the point in it.

Actually, it was a few very vocal users who made these claims long ago
and many people simply picked up on it.  It's *never* been about choice
for the sake of choice.  It has always been about empowerment.

> So my recommendation would be to eliminate stage1 and stage2 and just do
> stage3 installs. They're a lot faster too -- I think getting through
> stage1, stage2 and stage3 took about 6 hours on a 1 GHz P3, hardly a
> productive use of time. I think you might want to put a few more goodies
> in stage3, though -- vim for sure, and niceties like ufed, esearch,
> slocate, genkernel and grub at a minimum. When I do an install, the
> things I *always* bring in, whether desktop or server are:

We would absolutely not add any bloat to the stage3 tarballs.  The
stages are supposed to be minimal sets of things that are absolutely
required based on the default USE flags and nothing more.

Yes, I would love to see vim and gentoolkit in all of the stages, along
with distcc and ccache, but it isn't ever going to happen and I happen
to agree with the reasoning for *not* doing it.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux