should we tag "unsupport" the gentoo installer ?

Message

krinn · Post by **krinn** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 3:31 pm

I'm pretty sure i'm not alone to think that, the installer sucks badly (any version), people can't simply use it and do an install without getting errors.

It was also the case for the 2007 version, and we keep saying to anyone : use manual install from the handbook. And so is the 2008...

So until further evolutions of the installer to a real usable version, i'm asking if anyone else think it should be set as an uncommon way to install gentoo, and the recommended one clearly state as manual install with handbook.

This might help gentoo not award the most ridiculous distro to install.

poly_poly-man · Post by **poly_poly-man** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 4:18 pm

the installer sucks. The installer is not worth developing. The manual install is the best part.

I've heard more newcomers (to avoid n00b slang) with troubles with the installer than anything else - send them to the manual install, and they're alright.

The installer should be taken out to avoid confusion.

poly-p man

The installer is the worst thing since gnome

Prodigal · Post by **Prodigal** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 8:50 pm

I'm in agreement, remove the insaller until it's actually ready, I disagree that it isn't worth developing it is, the problem is not enough development has gone into it. Gentoo is one of the most specific and maticulous distros out there, which makes it quite difficult to set up if you don't know what you're doing. Now Gentoo THANKFULLY will never be a binary orientated distro like Ubuntu/Suse etc where you can simply open a package manager, click on a program and have it download and install the binary, one of the best things about Gentoo is the fact that you are compiling everything from source, you can tweak and modify your system to be as streamlined or as bloated as you like, that doesn't stop us having a reasonable installer however that can let people who are just starting out try the distro instead of us having to get all the ubuntu rejects who' gotten bored with it (Yes I know I'm one of them but I used Gentoo before I used Ubuntu so I'm excempt from the statement

).

Take the installer out or mark it as "not recommended" as it was in 2007.0 from my memory until the devs have produced something better. In the mean time get the devs working on it. The hardware detection is fine for example, it lacks however in assigning the right drivers to the system for things like Nvidia NForce, when using the installers I get no network or GUI after the install until I reboot into console, change the nv driver to vesa and modprobe forcedeth to bring up my network card, a lot of new commers won't know how to do that and will simply abandon Linux as a bad job, especially since lets face it Gentoo is the coolest distro there is so it's bound to attract more newbies.

kernelOfTruth · Post by **kernelOfTruth** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 9:04 pm

Now Gentoo THANKFULLY will never be a binary orientated distro like Ubuntu/Suse etc where you can simply open a package manager, click on a program and have it download and install the binary, one of the best things about Gentoo is the fact that you are compiling everything from source, you can tweak and modify your system to be as streamlined or as bloated as you like, that doesn't stop us having a reasonable installer however that can let people who are just starting out try the distro instead of us having to get all the ubuntu rejects who' gotten bored with it (Yes I know I'm one of them but I used Gentoo before I used Ubuntu so I'm excempt from the statement ).

are you sure ?

sabayon linux' Entropy might be what newbies are looking for (binary-distro at the first, later the possibility to let it become a source-based)

96140 · Post by **96140** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 9:24 pm

Prodigal · Post by **Prodigal** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 9:34 pm

nightmorph please accept my appologies I was not "having a dig". I agree the staffing issue is a hinderance and that help is needed. I'd be happy to volunteer my time as a dev but I fear my programming knowledge is not what it was since I became an I.T. engineer instead of a dev for a living. I'd be happy to work on my dev skills again and help out though, lately my career is moving more back towards Linux and Cisco than Windows anyway so I'll have to pick up on my scripting at the very least.

I'm absolutely positive that I read somewhere just after 2007.0 was released that the installer was not recommended, possibly it was on the forum or another linux site/forum in a gentoo discussion however.

kerneloftruth, I've looked at Sabayon Linux before and personally didn't feel like even downloading it but I suppose you're right, the idea of a primarily binary based distro with the ability to later on convert to source based is appealing for a newb, so long as they realise that is the case of course.

Personally however, after spending the weekend setting up my new 2008.0 install I wouldn't go back to a binary distro if you paid me (Although I did say that last time and then just got too busy to spend time compiling/tweaking and faced with the options of Ubuntu or Windows for a fast and easy to install system I chose Ubuntu)

yngwin · Post by **yngwin** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 9:47 pm

nightmorph wrote: I've mentioned that Releng is understaffed before, and we still haven't seen one single person make a serious commitment to step up and volunteer their time.

Then you're not looking. I'll repeat what I said in that thread: I want to get involved. And there was at least one other person in that thread who volunteered to help. You need to follow up on that. It seems you're not around when I'm looking for you on IRC, so I guess I'll mail instead.

AllenJB · Post by **AllenJB** » Mon Jul 14, 2008 7:30 am

<Devils advocate>
If few have volunteered to maintain the installer, does that surely not indicate that no one is really interested in it and thus it should be abandoned? The fact that releng believe they're understaffed mean they should look at the projects they work on and whether some of those should be dropped?

While bearing in mind that this is a forum poll and thus not totally representative of community opinion, an entire 1 person out of 21 has said that they want the installer project kept as-is. It seems a lot of effort is being expended to serve just 5% of the community that was probably served fine by the old binary package cd's anyway.
</Devils advocate>

96140 · Post by **96140** » Mon Jul 14, 2008 9:26 am

krinn · Post by **krinn** » Mon Jul 14, 2008 10:20 am

I'm not trying to say doing the installer is a mistake, but that putting the installer in that early state in the gentoo livecd is promoting that installation method.
And because the installer sucks (calling a cat a cat, not trying to lower the efforts done on it), it's doing a worst task than the main task it was at first done for...

I mean as you said, the installer is here to quickly deploy gentoo AND/OR in an easy way for low/average users that getting sick of reading a documentation.
But, because of its state, the people doesn't understand what's going on, it just fail, for plenty reasons, and even us (the gentoo users that have success in installing/using gentoo) can't help them.

Lookout the installation forum, people can't simply make it work, and helpers can only reply : "use the handbook manual install".
I don't think it's good for gentoo.

Also, because of X reasons, if you cannot produce a stable version of the installer : why the hell it is on the livecd ? If the product can't be finish at the livecd deadline: 1/ remove it from the livecd or 2/ break the deadline to finish it.

But gentoo doesn't need the installer to be install and shouldn't offer a bad choice to people wishing to install gentoo. I prefer people still think gentoo is an hard to install, not for average users distro than they think gentoo is a joke, because if they cannot install gentoo, the only thing they will see of gentoo is its installer.

AllenJB · Post by **AllenJB** » Mon Jul 14, 2008 11:06 am

Perhaps an answer to this would be documentation. I know it's not coding, but it is a means to an end. Taking a look at the project documentation, it seems rather old. Does this documentation still reflect the intentions, status and design of the project?

What about some documentation on (where to find out about) the known issues and any particular areas interested potential contributors should look at?

Also, if this project needs help, where's the staffing needs entry?

Yes it's documentation work, and that's not coding. But an hour or 2 spent updating and adding to the documentation could help potential contributors find a starting point.

aidanjt · Post by **aidanjt** » Tue Jul 15, 2008 3:45 pm

AllenJB wrote:Also, if this project needs help, where's the staffing needs entry?

Exactly, and there-in lays the problem, if some 300 developers isn't enough to maintain Gentoo, PR needs to make a MUCH greater effort to publically announce the distributions needs. You don't get new developers by muttering "we're understaffed" in some deeply nested mailing list/forum topic and not following up the few people that actually pass notice and step up to the line.

The other obvious problem, aside from the complete lack of functional communication, is the huge wall put up between users and developers which users need to climb over to start to make any kind of influence in the direction Gentoo takes. Is it any wonder users don't feel like contributing when they're made to feel like their opinions/ideas aren't worth the bytes it's written on?

Management should take the bull by the horns, address the PR problem, address the recruitment problem, start taking the users seriously, and start making Gentoo great again by giving it a sense of direction and self-worth.

Carlo · Post by **Carlo** » Tue Jul 15, 2008 4:39 pm

AidanJT wrote:if some 300 developers isn't enough to maintain Gentoo, PR needs to make a MUCH greater effort to publically announce the distributions needs.

This is one side of the coin. The other is getting qualified people to like to work on Gentoo. The number of people with a mouth wide open as a gate is and will be always higher. My advise to you is to ignore the installer as I do - or work on it.

neonl · Post by **neonl** » Tue Jul 15, 2008 4:55 pm

My answer in the poll would be "yes, and it isn't sadly, gentoo doesn't need an installer!".

Now seriously, even though an installer can be an interesting feature, i don't think Gentoo should actually have one, the manual installation is the correct way to install it, with all the understanding of what are you really installing.

The installer sucks.

aidanjt · Post by **aidanjt** » Tue Jul 15, 2008 5:53 pm

Carlo wrote:
AidanJT wrote:if some 300 developers isn't enough to maintain Gentoo, PR needs to make a MUCH greater effort to publically announce the distributions needs.
This is one side of the coin. The other is getting qualified people to like to work on Gentoo. The number of people with a mouth wide open as a gate is and will be always higher. My advise to you is to ignore the installer as I do - or work on it.

I completely agree, I've said something along these lines in the past somewhere, probably on IRC. I do ignore the installer btw, on the part of it being useless and not working.

blandoon · Post by **blandoon** » Tue Jul 15, 2008 6:23 pm

Carlo wrote:
AidanJT wrote:if some 300 developers isn't enough to maintain Gentoo, PR needs to make a MUCH greater effort to publically announce the distributions needs.
This is one side of the coin. The other is getting qualified people to like to work on Gentoo. The number of people with a mouth wide open as a gate is and will be always higher. My advise to you is to ignore the installer as I do - or work on it.

I agree, to an extent. I should start by saying that I'm not a developer. I don't have the skills required to fix all of these problems. All I can tell you is my experience with the graphical installer, and what happened when I ran into problems with it. I tried it once when it first appeared and wasn't able to complete the installation (I don't remember why anymore), so I hadn't tried it again until 2008.0, and when that failed, I posted a message here and got no useful responses. The impression I get is that nobody really expects it to work, which means (1) it won't ever get the attention it needs to improve, and (2) most people will ignore it, which means the effort would be better spent elsewhere.

Having said that, I realize this is an open-source, community-driven project, but it gets very tiresome to hear over and over again that if you can't fix a problem yourself, you are wrong to point it out. I would love to do more, but I am not a developer. And as someone else already pointed out, this starts to sound like the cry of a group of people who don't really want to be working on this project - which raises the question of what might happen in the future if we can't find enough people who do.

node_one · Post by **node_one** » Tue Jul 15, 2008 6:50 pm

AidanJT wrote:
AllenJB wrote:Also, if this project needs help, where's the staffing needs entry?
Exactly, and there-in lays the problem, if some 300 developers isn't enough to maintain Gentoo, PR needs to make a MUCH greater effort to publically announce the distributions needs. You don't get new developers by muttering "we're understaffed" in some deeply nested mailing list/forum topic and not following up the few people that actually pass notice and step up to the line.

The other obvious problem, aside from the complete lack of functional communication, is the huge wall put up between users and developers which users need to climb over to start to make any kind of influence in the direction Gentoo takes. Is it any wonder users don't feel like contributing when they're made to feel like their opinions/ideas aren't worth the bytes it's written on?

Management should take the bull by the horns, address the PR problem, address the recruitment problem, start taking the users seriously, and start making Gentoo great again by giving it a sense of direction and self-worth.

If I may quote you again; I do not believe that stating this "in some deeply nested mailing list/forum topic" has any effect. I have thought about contacting someone directly or making posts specifically about issues like this, but I am too new to this. I do not understand how Gentoo, the organization, works and I will not be able to make an effective comment/suggestion/recommendation. For now I will be content with reading and learning about these things. You, on the other hand, seem to be familiar with some of these issues, and the history of Gentoo, more in depth than I am. Maybe you should contact someone formally with your concerns. I will be interested to see what the response will be.

Anyway, back on topic, Nightmorph has a point here:

nightmorph wrote:The installer has the eventual goal (among others) of making Gentoo even more attractive to the corporate folks, the guys who want automated mass deployments.

It costs more money, in labor, to install Gentoo than another distro. I would say that it is a worthy goal. But if there are issues with it ( I have never used it. ) maybe there should not be official media released with it, yet.

blandoon · Post by **blandoon** » Tue Jul 15, 2008 7:00 pm

nightmorph wrote:Now that I've got a counterpoint to the devil's advocate outta the way, let me toss something else out there for ya'll. The installer has the eventual goal (among others) of making Gentoo even more attractive to the corporate folks, the guys who want automated mass deployments. The efforts you've been for seeing the last few releases are steps on that path. The installer is good for getting a system up and running quickly; that's why I believe it's suited to both the newcomers looking for a useful environment up-front and for the business-types who want the same system deployed on all their machines.

Okay, I agree that this is a good reason to have an installer and a worthy goal to shoot for. However, as it currently stands, the installer deals very poorly with esoteric server hardware, of the type that might be used by these same corporate types in a mass server deployment. In fact, that's why it puked all over me (I was installing on an HP server with a hardware RAID controller). From what I saw having tried it once, it doesn't seem like there has been much focus on anything other than the simplest possible use case.

aidanjt · Post by **aidanjt** » Tue Jul 15, 2008 7:20 pm

blandoon wrote:Okay, I agree that this is a good reason to have an installer and a worthy goal to shoot for. However, as it currently stands, the installer deals very poorly with esoteric server hardware, of the type that might be used by these same corporate types in a mass server deployment. In fact, that's why it puked all over me (I was installing on an HP server with a hardware RAID controller). From what I saw having tried it once, it doesn't seem like there has been much focus on anything other than the simplest possible use case.

Not to meantion that sysadmins are more likely to prefer remote deployment and management, PXE, NetBoot, and the like. Would it not be more benifital to focus on a set of tools and documentation for that and provide users a proper binary compile farm infrastructure? The effort of burning 20 or so CDs, and running around between 100 different computers is a headache, to say the last. I've been there, and I don't particularly care to repeat the process.

Portage doesn't have an API, and trying to yank an API out of it's codebase is an obvious reason as to why the installer has been a failure for years. It could be possible to reattempt an installer in the future when Portage (or any decending PMS) is in a decent state, that has a usable API.

I should note, that some years ago I brought up a number of possible issues Gentoo would have with enterprise adoption, this was amung them, and Gentoo isn't as painless as it once back then.

gentoo-dev · Post by **gentoo-dev** » Wed Jul 16, 2008 11:14 am

I voted yes. The installer sucks big time.
Being understaffed (and by the look of it, willingly) is no excuse for dumping a broken installer onto users and making it the only option for networkless installs.
If it's not finished, don't release it.
If you want it tested by a large audience, release it and do mark it as pre-alpha, and do provide a way to install without it.

I tried the 2008-r1 x86 inside virtualbox. The partioning is a joke. Mandrake e.g. was much better 8 years ago.
I could only use the 'recommended" layout or partition by hand.
I wanted to shrink the insanely too big swap, deleted sda3 and sda2, clicked on the button that represents the empty space next to sda1, button goes down and up and nothing else happens, no dialog to create a new partition appears.
Besides, partitioning in 2 steps is retarded. Look at what other distros were doing years ago.
Furthermore, installation did complete and (as expected) left a system that does not start X

even though the LiveCD does start X (provided you do not boot gentoo-nofb)

Tried Sabayon in the same virtualbox and like it or not, it worked out of the box.

should we tag "unsupport" the gentoo installer ?

do gtk/console installer should be set as "unsupport install method" ?

should we tag "unsupport" the gentoo installer ?