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

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Chris Gianelloni wrote:

>I'm starting to get more and more bugs from users whom have decided,
>against the recommendation of those of us in Release Engineering, to do
>a stage1 or stage2 installation using their custom USE flags, and
>finding that their installation is unable to complete properly.  The
>problem stems from more and more packages adding more and more USE
>flags.  We already recommend that all users perform a stage3
>installation, but this doesn't appear to be enough to resolve the
>problem.  What it really boils down to is the inability for us to test
>with all of the possible USE flag combinations and ever get a release
>out the door.
>
>As it stands, I only see a few options, none of which sound very good:
>
>1.  Only release stage3 tarballs
>2.  Inform users that only stage3 will be supported
>3.  Change the documentation to recommend users not change USE flags
>until after the completion of "emerge -e system"
>
>In pretty much every case, the real answer is "quit using stage1 if you
>don't know what you're doing" but unfortunately, we're going to get the
>pointless "but Gentoo is about choice" "argument" that really has no
>bearing on the truth of what is Gentoo.  Gentoo is *not* about choice.
>Gentoo is about empowering the user to make the system as he sees fit.
>This means there is a certain expectation that when you start fiddling
>with stuff, you're going to pick up the pieces on your own.  At any
>rate, the problem is only going to get worse as more and more USE flags
>are added.
>
>What can we do to curb this problem?
>
>
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.

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:

vim grub metalog vixie-cron slocate coldplug hotplug gentoo-sources 
genkernel ntp
zip unzip esearch gentoolkit rkhunter chkrootkit sysstat procinfo 
mirrorselect ufed



-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

http://linuxcapacityplanning.com

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