| 1 |
On Saturday 10 May 2008, davecode@××××××××××.net wrote: |
| 2 |
> Hi, |
| 3 |
> |
| 4 |
> We plan to eval Gentoo. We await 2008 final. The comment is, Gentoo |
| 5 |
> home page gives no clue about status. Convincing people that Gentoo |
| 6 |
> is "alive" becomes tricky because the final is months late and little |
| 7 |
> motion on the home page. That's about all most people inspect. |
| 8 |
|
| 9 |
I think you misunderstand how Gentoo works. |
| 10 |
|
| 11 |
First of all, there's no such thing as "the latest Gentoo version". What |
| 12 |
you do have is the current state of the portage tree and that is |
| 13 |
constantly changing. |
| 14 |
|
| 15 |
All that "2008" is, is a workable snapshot of a basic system that you |
| 16 |
use to install Gentoo. The next thing you do is update the tree to the |
| 17 |
latest state, and update the system by recompiling everything that has |
| 18 |
changed since your CD image was built. |
| 19 |
|
| 20 |
There's only one reason to wait for the 2008 CD, and that is if you have |
| 21 |
hardware that cannot boot from existing installers due to driver |
| 22 |
issues. So this is a bootstrap problem, not a latest version problem. |
| 23 |
For example, this very notebook I'm using now is 7 months old, and I |
| 24 |
used a 2005 installer CD to install - it just happened to be the only |
| 25 |
one I conveniently had handy at the time. |
| 26 |
|
| 27 |
Gentoo is not Ubuntu, don't try to think of it in Ubuntu terms. Don't |
| 28 |
claim that "this confuses new users", because those new users are |
| 29 |
mistaken. Shoehorning Gentoo into something where the latest installer |
| 30 |
is of vital importance is never going to work and all attempts to do so |
| 31 |
will fail, in much the same way that awaiting "linux kernel 2.6 SP9" is |
| 32 |
also never going to work out |
| 33 |
|
| 34 |
> So bottom line, impressions of Gentoo are going south even before we |
| 35 |
> test. |
| 36 |
|
| 37 |
That's a false assumption. You or your users are looking at a blue sky |
| 38 |
and asking why it isn't green with pink dots because those colours are |
| 39 |
nice. |
| 40 |
|
| 41 |
Doesn't work that way. |
| 42 |
|
| 43 |
> Some sort of "progress bar" or chart showing bugs squashed and new |
| 44 |
> reported, maybe?? At least some kind of "ticker" showing "expected |
| 45 |
> final release date"? Counting lines of code or something? |
| 46 |
> |
| 47 |
> Personally I don't care when final ships - just knowing "present |
| 48 |
> expectations" or status with an easy home page glance is all I ask. |
| 49 |
|
| 50 |
OK, so this is what you'd like. Unfortunately you can't get it. What |
| 51 |
could be done though is a nice big clear link to an article that |
| 52 |
explains how Gentoo works and why OS versioning is not relevant. |
| 53 |
|
| 54 |
Perhaps a chart laying out the latest stale and unstable versions of |
| 55 |
major packages, categorized by arch would suit your needs. |
| 56 |
Distrowatch's list of packages provided would be a good place to start. |
| 57 |
|
| 58 |
|
| 59 |
-- |
| 60 |
Alan McKinnon |
| 61 |
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com |
| 62 |
|
| 63 |
-- |
| 64 |
gentoo-user@l.g.o mailing list |
Archives