Re: [gentoo-user] Time to move on?

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 1:55 PM, Albert Hopkins <marduk@×××××××××××.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-03-22 at 13:23 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote:
>> Personally I think we're in one of those
>> unfortunate periods of time where there is a relatively high number of
>> issues. I'm seeing it on all my machines. It's taking far more of my
>> time to deal with this than I wish it would.
>>
>> 1) ntp-update problems at boot time.
>
> Hmm,  I'm not having any ntp-update problems on my machines.  Have you
> submitted a bug report or searched the bug database?  Obviously this
> isn't happening for everyone so if the right people don't know about it
> then you can't expect it to get fixed.

There's something going on here but I haven't tried to debug it. It's
more like ntp isn't finding servers. some machines work. Others don't.
timeouts waiting to boot. I need to find out where server names are
set and then see if there is a difference between all my machines.

No, I haven't filed a bug because:

1) I haven't figured out if it's my problem or Gentoo's yet
2) I have the impression that no one is reading or responding to bug
reports these days, based on my generally negative view of how portage
is being handled. But that's just my impression and not really worthy
of a discussion because it's all free labor and free software to me so
why should I complain?

>
>> 2) emerge -DuN world building lots of packages that are already on the
>> system but the LoG has apparently changed flags so emerge wants to
>> rebuild them.
>
> But that's what -N does! That's what it's documented to do. RTFM. If you
> don't want that behavior then don't use -N.  Either use --reinstall
> changed-use or don't use any USE-specific flags.  Personally I just let
> portage re-install as it doesn't really change anything if you haven't
> changed your use flags.

Thanks.

>
>> 3) New and unclear (to me) messages about portage flag overrides
>> caused by overlays I've been using for a while.
>
> These are probably warnings about overlays overriding settings in the
> regular portage profile.  Some overlays do this.  It's just a fact of
> life.  Again, if you don't want to deal with it then don't use overlays
> or at least choose overlays that don't do potentially bad things. It's
> not the Gentoo devs responsibility if you bring in 3rd-party overlays
> that change stuff.
>
> So with the possible exception of #1, these appear to be "but it hurts
> when I do that" problems, not issues with Gentoo stability.

I won't bother responding to the above.

Thanks,
Mark