Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo healthy?

[Mark Knecht]

Hi Alan

On 12/20/06, Alan McKinnon <alan@××××××××××××××××.za> wrote:
> On Wednesday 20 December 2006 16:56, Mark Knecht wrote:
>
> > I agree again. The ONLY problem I'm having with Gentoo is the devs
> > removing older revs of things from portage. (ati-drivers, MythTV,
> > etc.)
>
> In cases like that, you use portage overlays. Then the ebuild will
> always be there until *you* delete it

The problem with this view of overlays has been that I do an eix-sync
and find that something I'm currently running been removed from
portage - for whatever reason but mostly it's been security issues or
the developer not wanting to maintain an old version. At that point
it's gone. I cannot put into an overlay what I don't have. Probably
most frustrating has been that I don't know it will be removed until
it's been removed. At that point it's too late to be easy. (Nobody
said Gentoo cannot be easy - right? If they told me that I wouldn't be
able to run it!) ;-)

I understand that every package is out there in some repository on the
web. I think Neil has pointed me toward it once or twice at least. The
problem is for a user type like me, and yes, I'm *purely* a user type,
it's a bit beyond my skillset today to go get it and build the overlay
myself.

I've mentioned this in the past but the idea has never gained
traction. If portage is thinking about removing an ebuild from my
machine why not just move it to some location on my machine so I've
always got a copy of what I was running? I could build my overlay from
what's been moved there. No pain at all. Or I can do what you suggest
and remove it.

Anyway, that's my view from user land on this subject. It is only this
area where Gentoo is a bit of a pain for me. To be honest I still use
etc-update since I didn't get comfortable with dispatch-conf. I'd like
to be a bit more confident with the tools when it comes to updating
config files but it's not so bad to make it a problem.

>
> Just another example of The Gentoo Way where the user is completely in
> control :-)

I agree! Just looking for better data management, not a change in the system.

>
> [snip]
>
> > > I really don't care if Gentoo is considered a minority distro, it
> > > is not, and hopefully never will be, a mass market product.
> >
> > I'd prefer it did not. I still love Gentoo. It's easily the most
> > stable distro I've ever run. (RH & Suse here.) The support from the
> > devs has been second to none.
>
> I can attest to that. I run ~x86 on this notebook, sync daily and on
> *testing* *unstable* ebuilds I have to fix things only about once a
> week on average. That's phenomenal.
>
> My day job is, amongst other things, delivering the Red Hat courses and
> supporting RHEL where we installed it for customers. Now RHEL is pretty
> good as an enterprise OS but it's also a binary distro and you are
> stuck with what the RH engineers decided to give you. They are a decent
> crowd and genuinely try their best but they can't satisfy everyone, so
> they've sacrificed flexibility for a standard, unchanging platform. To
> a gentoo user that just feels .... constrained
>
> alan

I'm 51, retired from Silicon Valley and now trade stocks for a living.
Unfortunately my trading platform is Windows but I'm writing you from
my #1 daytime machine - my AMD64 Gentoo desktop running Gnome - mostly
stable. For fun I write and record music using mostly Linux tools all
on Gentoo. My wife and 14 year old son run Gentoo. My 78 year old
father and 77 year old mother run Gentoo. Gentoo works, even for us
user types. ;-)

Cheers,
Mark
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