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tld
Veteran
Joined: 09 Dec 2003
Posts: 1816
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 Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2008 9:38 pm Post subject: |
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| c0d3g33k wrote: |
My hat goes off to the KDE folks for having the stones to attempt KDE4. They are experiencing some major pain right now, but at least they tried to take the big leap instead of playing it safe. Gentoo doesn't seem to be that kind of project, if the energy with which the status quo was defended is any indication. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but if you're looking for major change, it may be better to look elsewhere. |
Wow...NeddySeagoon mentioned the lack of 'hard targets'...if people can't even decide whether Gentoo needs to be more careful and prevent all these supposed catastrophic update breakages or take bigger risks I have to agree with him. 
Tom |
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speeddemon
Apprentice
Joined: 27 Sep 2003
Posts: 162
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| Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2008 10:16 pm Post subject: |
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| NeddySeagoon wrote: | speeddemon,
Both portage and revdep-rebuild continue to be developed and there are two other package managers in development that I'm aware of. |
Revdep-rebuild is a band-aid fix. The problem needs to be fixed, and if that can't be accomplished with portage, then stop wasting time on it. And the other 2 package managers seem to have no chance of ever being mentioned by Gentoo (officially), and you know it. They aren't what Im talking about.
In fact, your statement proves what we've been saying all along. You say there are no problems, everything is fine. We point out problems, and you wave your hand, "those aren't problems, they're being worked on".
ITS 2008. FIX the damn problem already. Quit wasting time on the gentoolkit and other apps that try to repair the problems left by portage, and start moving towards a better package manager. It doesn't matter how much you polish a turd, or love it, or care for it, in the end its still a piece of shit (no I don't think portage is a piece of shit, but its showing its age). |
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NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54234
Location: 56N 3W
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| Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2008 10:51 pm Post subject: |
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speeddemon,
I agree portage and gentoolkit are showing their age but I don't share your opinion that portage can never be replaced.
Never is a long time.
_________________
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NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
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c0d3g33k
n00b
Joined: 26 Nov 2003
Posts: 43
Location: S.E. Connecticut
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| Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2008 10:56 pm Post subject: |
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| tld wrote: | Wow...NeddySeagoon mentioned the lack of 'hard targets'...if people can't even decide whether Gentoo needs to be more careful and prevent all these supposed catastrophic update breakages or take bigger risks I have to agree with him.
Tom |
Deciding whether Gentoo needs to be more careful or not isn't too hard. At least I don't have a problem deciding. It *does* need to be careful, because the instability is too disruptive for too many people (at least those that rely on Gentoo for servers etc). Once a certain level of stability has been reached, going back is a regression. What people need to decide is whether they want stability (stay with Gentoo) or want bigger risks and so need to look elsewhere. Wanting exciting risk-taking from the Gentoo project is to live in the past, IMHO. CVS is a good case in point. Useful for it's time, but it wasn't ever going to become more than it was. So we got SVN. And SVN ("CVS done right") is likely on the way to the dustbin of history as the distributed versioning systems move to the forefront.
Neddy is right to press for 'hard targets' - they are exactly the kind of definable goal any project needs to move forward and make incremental improvements. These hard targets will make Gentoo better.
The more interesting question to me is whether Gentoo represents the logical end point of the 'source-centric' Linux distribution model (ie. it can't get any better than this). Is Gentoo the pinnacle of the source-centric concept? If not, how can the concept could be taken further? What does that look like? Those are the hard targets I'm interested in. |
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micr0c0sm
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 29 Oct 2005
Posts: 148
Location: New York
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| Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 12:35 am Post subject: |
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Gentoo should be experimenting like crazy all the time while hardmasked, and work ideas/programs towards unstable and THEN be really careful when marking something stable. Provide an easy to setup testing environment for people who want to try crazy things (or just a really good howto chroot article) and let them report what they like and dislike on the forums and bugs on the trackers. Stating that gentoo should be careful as a good reason to have slow development is ludicrous.
Also, ++ on the hard targets, just I hope for the love of all things holy it does not spawn yet another subcommittee. The organization needs another subcommitee like I need another hole in my head. Heck maybe even some house cleaning should be in order, just like the current US government. I know! - Ron Paul for Gentoo Benevolent Dictator! |
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steveL
Watchman
Joined: 13 Sep 2006
Posts: 5153
Location: The Peanut Gallery
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| Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 3:12 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | As projects get older, they tend to move away from the benevolent dictatorship model and toward more openly democratic systems. This is not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with a particular BD. It's simply that group-based governance is more "evolutionarily stable", to borrow a biological metaphor. |
| c0d3g33k wrote: | | Yeah, that's the bit that jumped out at me too. A good question is how relevant this is to a distribution as opposed to a discrete software project (eg. Subversion). Seems to me the transition mentioned above coincides somewhat with reaching stability/feature completeness. Or in the case of a typical business development project lifecycle, release and deployment. The emphasis shifts from intensive development (adding new features, refining and finishing existing ones, integrating it all) to maintenance (bug fixes, incremental updates etc.). |
Perhaps for an individual software project, based around an application like subversion. An OS or a distro is very different in that it provides an ecosystem for other things to work in.
| Quote: | | It's a lot easier to run on autopilot in the latter case, so group-based governance is sufficient. Contrast this with a project like the Linux kernel, where active development is still the primary focus - Linus still plays a useful role. |
There is still a hell of a lot of active development in Gentoo. It's just that this goes on in conjunction with upstream packages. php and haskell for instance, both feed major amounts of bugs and fixes to upstream, as does gnome. That's why other projects like Gentoo users (well the ones who don't demand everything for yesterday): we really test their software out and draw attention to code and portability flaws. A bindist will patch, but there's no urgency about getting the fixes. That can become a bottleneck. Although debian and redhat are also the upstream so their packages get fixed quickly, and consequently reciprocate, Gentoo pushes for patches to be available to everyone from upstream as quickly as possible.
I don't think people realise quite how much respect and affection Gentoo has as the longest running source distro. OFC the poisonous dev mailing list is known far and wide, but most of the users and the devs, are well respected. And the dev m-l is getting a lot better imo.
| Quote: | | I guess a good question is whether Gentoo has hit the maintenance plateau or whether it is closer to something like the kernel that never really stops moving. It feels like the former right now, which is probably why the prospect of a BD seems counterproductive and undesirable to many, and group governance seems good enough. |
Nah it doesn't seem "good enough" to me. It seems an awful lot better. People are free to setup their own fiefdoms if they want, and if they can attract enough devs. I don't really care: if I don't like someone I do my best not to deal with them, and in the meantime the software just gets better and better. The herds and devs sort themselves out as and when they want. If a project doesn't do much, or finishes its task, it's easy enough for them to be disbanded. Meantime they're all contributing to software I can emerge at any time I like.
On top of this, it's the best platform I've ever used for software development.
"Strong leaders are good; strong institutions are better. A strong community is best of all." |
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speeddemon
Apprentice
Joined: 27 Sep 2003
Posts: 162
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| Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 3:25 pm Post subject: |
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| NeddySeagoon wrote: | speeddemon,
I agree portage and gentoolkit are showing their age but I don't share your opinion that portage can never be replaced.
Never is a long time. |
Well, its been how many years now? They (gentoo devs, not 3rd party) at least need to start working towards replacing it. Get a timeline, do SOMETHING.
Something that has the ability to fix one of gentoo's only major shortfalls and increase the stability of users systems, its been known for years. Why is nothing being done? |
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jonnevers
Veteran
Joined: 02 Jan 2003
Posts: 1594
Location: Gentoo64 land
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| Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 3:48 pm Post subject: |
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Gentoo, in case you are unaware, is an open-source project where people volunteer their time and support.
so, you DO SOMETHING besides just ragging on it constantly.... "but i am volunteering, i am posting these issues to the forums" blah blah blah. DO SOMETHING, as you so succinctly stated. |
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speeddemon
Apprentice
Joined: 27 Sep 2003
Posts: 162
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| Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 5:36 pm Post subject: |
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| jonnevers wrote: | Gentoo, in case you are unaware, is an open-source project where people volunteer their time and support.
so, you DO SOMETHING besides just ragging on it constantly.... "but i am volunteering, i am posting these issues to the forums" blah blah blah. DO SOMETHING, as you so succinctly stated. |
And thats the next thing thats always said when a valid point is brought up. "its open source, quit whining and help".
Me volunteering my time has nothing to do with what Im talking about, you are using it as a diversion so you don't have to address the issue Im talking about. Even if I did volunteer, that wouldn't change anything. |
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jonnevers
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Joined: 02 Jan 2003
Posts: 1594
Location: Gentoo64 land
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| Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 6:33 pm Post subject: |
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| speeddemon wrote: | | you are using it as a diversion so you don't have to address the issue Im talking about. |
not exactly, i believe you are overstating and exaggerating the "issue" you are talking about. as my anecdotal evidence doesn't paint revdep-rebuild in a bad light. | speeddemon wrote: | | Even if I did volunteer, that wouldn't change anything. |
if you came up with a valid way for portage to do reverse dependency resoltuion, even if you don't write the code itself, how would that not change something? You'd be surprised by the amount of impact a single person can have on an open source project (of any scope) when they aren't only contributing "talk". or do do nothing or something but it's silly to think you'll spark worthwhile development interest without getting your hands very dirty. |
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speeddemon
Apprentice
Joined: 27 Sep 2003
Posts: 162
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| Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 7:20 pm Post subject: |
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| jonnevers wrote: | | speeddemon wrote: | | you are using it as a diversion so you don't have to address the issue Im talking about. |
not exactly, i believe you are overstating and exaggerating the "issue" you are talking about. as my anecdotal evidence doesn't paint revdep-rebuild in a bad light. |
Just because you haven't found any problems with it doesn't mean anything. Do a little searching, it doesn't work all the time.
| Quote: |
if you came up with a valid way for portage to do reverse dependency resoltuion, even if you don't write the code itself, how would that not change something? You'd be surprised by the amount of impact a single person can have on an open source project (of any scope) when they aren't only contributing "talk". or do do nothing or something but it's silly to think you'll spark worthwhile development interest without getting your hands very dirty. |
Umm, both the other package managers do handle reverse deps. Both have sparked interest, both have a lot of time sunk in them. And the official line from gentoo, "we won't support them, portage works fine, its not broke. If you want to use another package manager, your on your own".
If the gentoo devs snub those 2 efforts, why on earth would I waste my time to develop something? From everything I've seen, they would ignore me too. |
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cyrius
n00b
Joined: 27 Jan 2007
Posts: 70
Location: France
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| Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 7:38 pm Post subject: |
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Perhaps, we can remember a valid submit :
Portage should manage a stable Realease.
Did you see the GLEP about ????
And anyway, if don't have a mentor ....... good luck. 
The question is why have you a so closed process to become a dev ? |
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cyrius
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Joined: 27 Jan 2007
Posts: 70
Location: France
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| Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 7:57 pm Post subject: |
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an other point is when you are a basic user and you have a Gentoo installed since six month or one year.
And suddenly, you update it. Well, good luck. You will have more chance by reinstall it completely. Yes, you will loose your work, or you have to save it and so on....
But anyway, that's not simple !
I have the case today on my laptop. That's crazy. Just because i don' have the intermediate ebuilds between two versions ? BS 
Why ? Because they have clean portage.... and my old laptop. |
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tld
Veteran
Joined: 09 Dec 2003
Posts: 1816
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| Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 8:07 pm Post subject: |
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| speeddemon wrote: |
Umm, both the other package managers do handle reverse deps. Both have sparked interest, both have a lot of time sunk in them. And the official line from gentoo, "we won't support them, portage works fine, its not broke. If you want to use another package manager, your on your own".
If the gentoo devs snub those 2 efforts, why on earth would I waste my time to develop something? From everything I've seen, they would ignore me too. |
Forgive me if I'm incorrect here, as I don't use any of the other package managers...but doesn't Paludis handle reverse deps just like revdep-rebuild, only using reconcilio instead? From what I read on their site that's what it appears to do.
EDIT: I see now that it's apparently supposed to handle dependencies when uninstalling...I missed that,
Tom |
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Rad
Guru
Joined: 11 Feb 2004
Posts: 401
Location: Bern, Switzerland
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| Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 8:28 pm Post subject: |
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| c0d3g33k wrote: | | Deciding whether Gentoo needs to be more careful or not isn't too hard. At least I don't have a problem deciding. It *does* need to be careful, because the instability is too disruptive for too many people (at least those that rely on Gentoo for servers etc). Once a certain level of stability has been reached, going back is a regression. |
That's how it would be ideally, but I think quality expectations like this are unrealistically high for a source based meta-distribution. Too many possible permutations to do much testing, and reviewing all the source code in detail is obviously also infeasible.
You'll just have to do your own testing before deployment on production servers on a testing machine, by yourself. Otherwise you have to do with a random amount of ~arch people and developers doing random things NOT running into problems they reported, as well as the actual software developers having done a good job prior to that - which is obviously resulting in packages of varying stability.
Of course, in the future, someone could probably automate a bit more of the testing or introduce some package quality (or review) metrics system or some such for people to work with - but that's not going to be easy at all.
Anyhow, at the moment it's just impossible to do extensive testing like that which would prevent "regressions" for even just a majority of users. It's like asking NASA to figure out how to start colonizing planets in another galaxy, soon. Quite a few (but unpredictable number of) steps between now and that becoming feasible, if it can happen at all... |
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c0d3g33k
n00b
Joined: 26 Nov 2003
Posts: 43
Location: S.E. Connecticut
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| Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 11:45 pm Post subject: |
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| Rad wrote: | | c0d3g33k wrote: | | Deciding whether Gentoo needs to be more careful or not isn't too hard. At least I don't have a problem deciding. It *does* need to be careful, because the instability is too disruptive for too many people (at least those that rely on Gentoo for servers etc). Once a certain level of stability has been reached, going back is a regression. |
That's how it would be ideally, but I think quality expectations like this are unrealistically high for a source based meta-distribution. |
Good points, though perhaps missing mine, which was about whether users are capable of deciding if Gentoo needs to be careful or take bigger risks. The point being that the time for taking big risks has passed for various reasons and folks wanting radical and risky changes might better seek them elsewhere. |
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Rad
Guru
Joined: 11 Feb 2004
Posts: 401
Location: Bern, Switzerland
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| Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 12:30 am Post subject: |
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| c0d3g33k wrote: | | Good points, though perhaps missing mine, which was about whether users are capable of deciding if Gentoo needs to be careful or take bigger risks. The point being that the time for taking big risks has passed for various reasons and folks wanting radical and risky changes might better seek them elsewhere. |
But what is a "big risk" here? Are you saying developers willfully allow broken packages into Gentoo stable and hoping that users don't complain? Then I agree, they shouldn't do that - of course, I don't think anyone has.
Or was it something else?
As far as I'm concerned, I was mostly trying to say that any package change in Gentoo will have an untestable risk of breaking someone's machine. The same risk as the current portage tree and tooling also carries.
And since risk is not verifiable by testing (near infinite problem size, surely not something we can do) - we'll have to do with fairly unscientific measures to quantify risk, such as whether a random bunch of ~arch users encounters problems or whether upstream considers their own package stable by their own definitions.
You'll need to come up with a better AND accepted way to actually quantify risk if you want an improvement. It's not that everyone already KNOWS how to make inclusion / patching or even code writing decisions that will lead to more stability... |
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yabbadabbadont
Advocate
Joined: 14 Mar 2003
Posts: 4791
Location: 2 exits past crazy
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| Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 12:34 am Post subject: |
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| If nothing else, Daniel's offer seems to have stimulated more visible discussions, and feedback to the users, than was common before. Both of which are good things in my opinion. It also seems to me, that the rate of GLSA's has increased since then. I haven't actually tallied the numbers, so it could just be a case of my noticing them more now. Anyway, to me, Gentoo appears to be more alive now than it has in quite a while. |
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steveL
Watchman
Joined: 13 Sep 2006
Posts: 5153
Location: The Peanut Gallery
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| Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 8:23 am Post subject: |
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| cyrius wrote: | an other point is when you are a basic user and you have a Gentoo installed since six month or one year.
And suddenly, you update it. Well, good luck. You will have more chance by reinstall it completely. Yes, you will loose your work, or you have to save it and so on....
But anyway, that's not simple !
I have the case today on my laptop. That's crazy. Just because i don' have the intermediate ebuilds between two versions ? BS :cry:
Why ? Because they have clean portage.... and my old laptop. |
Well most of us do update Gentoo more often that. It's a rolling release distro, and it helps if you keep your software up to date. Some of us update daily, others weekly or monthly. But it's not like a binary distro where you do reinstall completely every 6 months.
You can get old ebuilds from the attic, or you could use a binhost to update from. |
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cyrius
n00b
Joined: 27 Jan 2007
Posts: 70
Location: France
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| Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 10:02 am Post subject: |
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Thanks Stevel 
I try straight away |
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steveL
Watchman
Joined: 13 Sep 2006
Posts: 5153
Location: The Peanut Gallery
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| Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 10:07 am Post subject: |
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| c0d3g33k wrote: | | The point being that the time for taking big risks has passed for various reasons and folks wanting radical and risky changes might better seek them elsewhere. |
I don't know that it has. It's easy to work on something on your own, or as a group, separately to the mainstream of Gentoo development, since it's Free software. In the worst case, you just treat Gentoo as upstream, if you find that you can't actually get your stuff into Gentoo proper. But first you actually have to develop the new thing. There's no need to be a Gentoo developer to work using the codebase though. In a sense Gentoo devs are more constrained in that the first priority as a distro is to maintain the tree. |
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djdunn
l33t
Joined: 26 Dec 2004
Posts: 810
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| Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 10:27 am Post subject: |
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| cyrius wrote: | an other point is when you are a basic user and you have a Gentoo installed since six month or one year.
And suddenly, you update it. Well, good luck. You will have more chance by reinstall it completely. Yes, you will loose your work, or you have to save it and so on....
But anyway, that's not simple !
I have the case today on my laptop. That's crazy. Just because i don' have the intermediate ebuilds between two versions ? BS
Why ? Because they have clean portage.... and my old laptop. |
you have to remember that this is a source based distro, and we don't have releases per say, the longer you stay out of sync the more difficult its going to be to get back in sync with the tree.
_________________
“Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the Universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good and just and beautiful.”
― Plato |
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yabbadabbadont
Advocate
Joined: 14 Mar 2003
Posts: 4791
Location: 2 exits past crazy
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| Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 10:53 am Post subject: |
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| Personally, I've always found it much easier to sync and update (if needed) every day. This is especially true for someone running a dial-up connection. (which I did for about the first two years I used gentoo) More frequent, but smaller updates. It is easier to fix breakages that way too. |
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djdunn
l33t
Joined: 26 Dec 2004
Posts: 810
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| Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 11:24 am Post subject: |
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| yabbadabbadont wrote: | | Personally, I've always found it much easier to sync and update (if needed) every day. This is especially true for someone running a dial-up connection. (which I did for about the first two years I used gentoo) More frequent, but smaller updates. It is easier to fix breakages that way too. |
ditto minus the dialup
_________________
“Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the Universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good and just and beautiful.”
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cyrius
n00b
Joined: 27 Jan 2007
Posts: 70
Location: France
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| Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 12:50 pm Post subject: |
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Can we select a limit date to sync with the attic ?
I mean if i want to have all ebuilds valid before 06/06/2007, there is a way ?
Use of subversion ? |
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