Re: [gentoo-user] minimal installation CD iso is where?, &&

[Alan McKinnon]

On 06/08/2015 11:13, Felix Miata wrote:
>> Gentoo is not supposed to be easy, but if you'd just followed the
>> > handbook you would have got what you wanted.
> Choosing non-defaults breaks the flow, especially when a branch explanation
> ends before an answer emerges. It probably would have been easy if only the
> first 3 or 4 Distrowatch columns existed and it had an empty systemd row. I
> haven't been able to reconcile apparent choices the older columns imply with
> Gentoo's instructions and mirror content. You understand how Gentoo "version"
> selection works. 4 days later and I'm apparently still a long way off from
> getting it, or whether it even offers any such thing.
>
> The swarm of good help I got here early on induced me to keep trying when I
> was really too exhausted to focus. I need to table it until some time when
> I'm mentally stronger, and less distracted. Dogged persistence isn't a
> positive attribute in every context. Sleep gets short changed, and failure
> snowballs.


Forget everything Distrowatch says about Gentoo. It is written by
Distrowatch people trying to fit Gentoo into the Distrowatch mould, and
it does not work.

Gentoo has versions of things, just like all distros. The difference is
that other distros usually offer just one version of a given package,
Gentoo can offer many. Some packages do only have one version in the
tree, that's because the maintainers does it that way.

Generally, you will install the highest version that matches your
keywords (essential either stable or unstable). This gives you a setup
somewhat vaguely analogous to stable and testing on Debian (or to
stretch the parallel to snapping point, between latest RHEL and latest
Fedora.)

Some folks complain about all the config choices that have to be made
when setting up a Gentoo system initially. Well, these folks entirely
miss the whole point of Gentoo - it is highly configurable, which means
choices. These choices have to be made and indicated at some point, at
the point to do that is right at the beginning, right in the middle of
the install process. It's how the distro works.

I get the feeling from reading your posts that you are trying to
understand Gentoo by comparing it to a binary distro to find common
ground. That won't help, you run out of similarities very quickly.
Gentoo has to be understood on it's own terms, not in terms of how it
compares to say Fedora


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com