Why I'm dropping recommendation of Gentoo

blueaura · n00b Joined: 05 Sep 2005 Posts: 66

The way I see it Gentoo represents choice. Choice of all packages except the core system packages through a slow but rewarding emerge fest, also the choice of bleeding edge with something like the ck source kernel or stable with the vanilla sources. It even goes as far as providing different levels of stability through different CPU architectures amd64 ~amd64 etc.

All that needs to be done is add several more levels of stability for each arch only problem is that who is going to maintain all these different levels for each arch?

I use Gentoo because it gives me the greatest choice possible, thats all I can ask for. If you screw your system because you use ~arch then to be honest that is your fault and like somone said before if huge bugs get into the stable build then really there is nothing to be done about it.

Perhaps portage could have a feature which reports back to a central server that x people have compiled the package succesfully out of y people. Even going into more detail of the z number that failed were running this 'insert emerge --info'. This could be integrated into the emerge system so that you could do something like emerge --stable kdebase returning something like # kdebase-x.x.x-rx 94% stable one x ... and so on.

Now I run ~ on all my systems amd64 and x86 with no problems so far 'touch wood' I am risky and run emerge -uD world && emerge --depclean && revdep-rebuild. This gets done at least once a week but I know I have the time to fix my cock ups if I need to but not everyone does and a system admin for a large cluster sure won't.

Well thats my 2 pence, commence flaming

XenoTerraCide · Veteran Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 1418 Location: MI, USA

I agree... which is why I'm still here, and I'm less irritated now than I was then. I have had apps move to stable and have major breakage, in fact the app in question I had emerge while it was ~x86 had the breakage, filed a bug report, moved back to stable, where it worked, and the maintainer still moved it to stable. The package broke for me again on upgrade. I was pissed. The maintainer said following the onscreen instructions it gave worked... those instruction's involve recompiling the source, which manually I don't know that much about, turns out only one step was needed but when I asked the maintainer for more help. this was a few weeks ago... I still haven't received an answer. I have solved the problem though... but I posted that answer in the thread I started in the forum's and not the bug, which I believe is still marked new... I should probably look it up one of these days and close it... with the answer... but I've been busy with homework. The bug also was linked to the thread so... I'm just unhappy that I filed a bug fo a ~arch package that was ignored mostly, and then the package was moved stable breaking me again.
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sundialsvc4 · Guru Joined: 10 Nov 2005 Posts: 436

I suspect that the single criticism most often voiced about Gentoo is the very long compile-times, especially when one suspects (correctly) that the compile that has been grinding away for the last X hours on your machine has been done on many thousands of other machines around the world with more-or-less exactly the same result. Wouldn't it be nice, sometimes, if you could get a copy of a pre-fabricated binary? If you wanted one?

Portage has, of course, had this capability for quite some time. And there are lots of binary packages out there ... a good thing because, no, you really don't want to try to compile OpenOffice!

I think that the Gentoo people would do well by devising a way to promote some "common stock configurations," prepare pre-compiled binary images for those configurations, and place them on servers throughout the world. Not every package needs this treatment, but "heavyweights" like KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice, and MySQL could certainly benefit.

I believe that the pre-compiled binaries should generally be fairly minimal configurations, versus the "everything but the kitchen sink" configs that are preferred by most other distros. The idea might simply be to reduce the total amount of time that one must spend compiling before one has something to show for it: an up-and-running Gentoo distribution on a new machine, that works.

Once the user's new machine is "comfortably working," those binary packages might one-by-one be replaced by custom-compiled code. But for some of it, quite frankly, there's no real reason to recompile it yourself, because your favorite set of compiler-optimizations probably won't make any tremendous difference in execution speed over what someone else has already done. So I think that we should strive to give users the choice.

"Dictum Ne Agas -- Do Not Do A Thing Already Done." That would be very nice, sometimes.

---
P.S. Gentoo .. runnin' it .. lovin' it!

XenoTerraCide · Veteran Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 1418 Location: MI, USA

they already have that. its the package cd. which by the way seems to have been moved to the universal cd.
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Paloseco · n00b Joined: 08 Mar 2005 Posts: 27

What I love of Gentoo:
* rc and rc-update commands, more intuitive than in other distros
* dynamic script loading. The services are loaded by dependencies instead of prorities and you can have an init.d script for each network (net.eth0, net.wlan0, etc...). That is what i really love from gentoo.
* Has lot of documentation. This last 2006.0 release has less documentation and only focused on GUI, that I place in worse documentation.

What I do not like:
* Portage does not check dependencies. If you uninstall any program that may drive your system to breakage.
* You cannot purge configurations created by the programs. Debian for example, solves these 2 problems.
* This last 2006.0 is focused for GUI-only installation and management, something that gentoo is not ready for. If you want to follow usual installation with 2005.1 guide the /distfiles folder in cdrom is missing. You have to download source code besides from downloading the isos! This is a joke and a waste of time.
* There is no DVD release with updated portage, source tarballs, stage3/GRP. Just a couple of CDs and get it by your own.
* In 2006.0 is impossible to find out where is the root/gentoo password gone.
* Some problems that were solved months ago in other distros still are persistent in gentoo. For example, sound problems.
* The assignment of persistent interfaces does not exist on gentoo. In debian you have /etc/iftab to configure it and get it working.
* There are missing important hardware/admin tool needed for the correct identification of the hardware. An example is the lshw command, that allows you to see the mac address of a net card. Doing "lshw | grep serial" you can see the mac addresses associated to your devices.

GeneralKane · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Posts: 77

Ok, I haven't been using Gentoo in a good while. I left by accident when I tried to work with Gentoo/BSD. Something happened during the trip, and I stayed with FreeBSD. Gentoo is a beautiful system, there really is nothing like it for linux. Debian does have some potential but Gentoo is marvelous about many linux situations. But I really do have to agree, this distro is too high maintence. There really is no way to just freeze and stay with a set of packages. The make.profile I had was deleted in a emerge sync. I just want a system that works. People keep bringing up Gentoo gives me choice and flexibility. Now does this flexibility extend to where I can leave my system as is and have it work well in the future.

Another grievance is how difficult it is upgrade a system -uD world, the whole nine. The procedure got so complicated that to do a careful job you need a shell script of commands to successfully complete it. There will always be at least one package that fails and I needed to go hunting through the forums to find a fix for it. Each of those fixes as they occured on the forum should have become bug reports with patches that could be submitted. The problems I have with Gentoo are easily solvable, but they take care and a sense of engineering. Gentoo will always be my favorite Linux dsitribution, and I hope one day I will use it again. But that really is up to the community.

aidy · l33t Joined: 07 Apr 2005 Posts: 915

Hey smarty, if you want to freeze your system, you don't need to do any emerge --syncs anymore? Sounds logical no? mm?

aidy · l33t Joined: 07 Apr 2005 Posts: 915

GeneralKane · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Posts: 77

loki99 · Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 9:26 am Post subject:

XenoTerraCide · Veteran Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 1418 Location: MI, USA

last x86 program I had fail on me at compile time was libquicktime. Didn't bother to look into it though... didn't care enough. and it seems to have worked this time. maybe it was a bug somewhere else that was fixed.
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Paloseco · n00b Joined: 08 Mar 2005 Posts: 27

XenoTerraCide · Veteran Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 1418 Location: MI, USA

Paloseco · n00b Joined: 08 Mar 2005 Posts: 27

XenoTerraCide · Veteran Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 1418 Location: MI, USA

you mean you want portage to check if I unmerge say a library that an application depends on. example I could be a KDE user and unmerge QT without it complaining at me. only to find that when I exit kde I'm missing something very important. Is that the kind of thing your referring to?
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Paloseco · n00b Joined: 08 Mar 2005 Posts: 27

XenoTerraCide · Veteran Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 1418 Location: MI, USA

yeah I wish I could say take your crap with you when I uninstall an application I decided was crap. These are good ideas however. File a bug / feature request. It won't be in the next version of portage, that should be here soon, but it might be able to make it in to the one after that. I want an option to say remove all configuration files created for a program that I'm removing. I don't want it on by default. but I would like it.
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at240 · l33t Joined: 12 Aug 2005 Posts: 603 Location: UK

aidy · l33t Joined: 07 Apr 2005 Posts: 915

Hm? So what exactly is the problem with emerge -uDN world?

GeneralKane · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Posts: 77

loki99 · Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2006 8:31 pm Post subject:

fangspeen · n00b Joined: 29 Oct 2004 Posts: 1

To be honest I only realy read the first and last page of this thread but I'm fairly sure of what I would find a lot of bickering about:

My feelings on the subject is this:

I use Gentoo on sevral production web and mail servers. My reasons:

(I find freebsd especialy painfull to setup and debian not nearly as flexible as I would like lets leave rh out of this since I just don't like the way they do things)

On these production servers I try to update all packages more than once a week. I need them secure and up to date and I do understand that if "security fixes" keep using new versions of packages eventualy older things are going to break.
It is a HUGE task tho especialy when things change in portage like the layout of apache's conf files or dev-php/php changing to dev-lang/php or even mysql 4 changing to 4.1 (still haven't done that one can't afford the down time)
every so often I do break these systems by doing updates.
I would say that the warning messages, I never get to see, allong with the complexity of merging updated config files (trying to remember if I changeds any thing in a given conf file for sometimes critical reasons etc.) is by far the longest ,hardest, most dangerous, most taxing part of the process

I use Gentoo on even more fw proxy antivirus antispam mail servers on small client networks. My reasons:
Flexibility and the theoretical ability to upgrade the whole solution every so often

In practice tho I hardly ever update these machines and yes after a year or two you realy are stuffed if you want to try and install some thing from portage (say an analisys tool since the machine is acting up or some thing)
The reason I never update these is simple the risk of me breaking the system with un update is far greater than the risk of the machine being compromised by an attacker aswell as the time that I simply do not have to invest in such in devours for reasons stated above relating to complex nature of configurations with anti*-filters and virtualmail solutions authenticated thru db lookups etc.

So after all that My idee is this: if it where posible to single out changes that you, the user, made to configuration files and store these in some form of database or lookup table (like the /etc/portage/pakage.use stores use flags for individual packages) so that when an update occurs you are given options that indicates when a conf file has changed from its old default behavior or wheter the old conf is infact your custom behaviour -- ofcourse this still wont completely free you of the need to research some significant changes and how to deal with them, now and then but It would allow for the possibility of automating the update process with out being concerned that the rules.conf file in your firewall script will be over written with a blank one or the like

I guess the only real ways to do this would be to get all packages to play nice and use similar conf file formats (maybe libconf) and or to seperate system specific configuration from default or more general application configuration.

slycordinator · Advocate Joined: 31 Jan 2004 Posts: 3065 Location: Korea

aidy · l33t Joined: 07 Apr 2005 Posts: 915

Paloseco, maybe you still didn't get it. YOU NEED TO CONFIGURE STUFF YOURSELF
if youcan't make your sound work, and other distros, it's absolutely your fault.

The Mad Mahdi · Posted: Thu Apr 27, 2006 3:23 am Post subject:

523 posts before this one and counting?! Dudes, give it up already! :lol: