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kamilsok
n00b
Joined: 02 Mar 2010
Posts: 39
Location: Gdynia
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 Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2011 10:33 am Post subject: |
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| archrax wrote: | | This sums up what Arch is in my view. Arch is a distribution by the developers, for the developers. |
Considering my experience with Arch I'd rather say, it's a raw playground for the end-user. But a developer dedicated distro.. would argue with that:)
| archrax wrote: | | Gentoo is therefore hopefully my Arch replacement. Similar philosophy, more freedom. I've just finished my first Gentoo build on bare metal and it booted first time, much to my surprise. And this is on a brand new, high spec rig running the latest hardware. So at the moment I am a very happy camper. It took me 3 days to do it (I take a long time because I'm anal and I like to take notes as well as try and understand every command I enter which means a lot or reading around.) Next time will be quicker as I now have the experience and I also saved all the configuration files I could. But I don't want there to be too many next times. |
Heh.. now there's my kind of user:) I also like to take notes (have lot's of them), backup/save config files and read, read, READ everything to know, how stuff works and be able to tinker with it. But unfortunatelly that kind of attitude streches Gentoo setup time way beyond productivity.
Overall I would consider Arch a distribution best suited for me (simple, raw, pure, Unix way in mind et.c.), but, as I said earlier, I would be myself if I hadn't tried Gentoo first.
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"If you are using Linux as a development platform, do not skip first learning administration and security. It is a foolish programmer indeed who is not master of his or her own computer" |
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kamilsok
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Joined: 02 Mar 2010
Posts: 39
Location: Gdynia
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| Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2011 10:42 am Post subject: |
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| jdhore wrote: |
In comparison, Arch's rules are: Not everything hits testing...Most packages go straight to extra/community unless they're a big suite (like GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc) or a core package. For stuff that does go to testing: 2 developer signoffs per arch (so 4 total, since there are only 2 arches supported by Arch) and that's it. No other criteria, as soon as it gets all 4, it can go to core. It could have 100 bugs filed against it the bugtracker, but as long as the developers choose to ignore that, it goes stable...*AND* the developers are extremely bad at "archtesting/QA"...A few months ago, there was a version bump to util-linux (I think) that changed the way some of the disk related stuff in it worked. Here was what one signoff looked like: "I didn't test any of these tools (that actually had changes), but booting worked. Signoff x86_64" ...That's just insane. |
That is part of the Arch way.. "if the upstream considers a package stable, so do we.. period". State that along side with minimal to none patching and You should get an environment used by app developers for testing (raw Linux). Since there is little to no change in the package or the surroundings, bugs should be considered app-based and sourced to TUV itself.
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"If you are using Linux as a development platform, do not skip first learning administration and security. It is a foolish programmer indeed who is not master of his or her own computer" |
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Gabriel_Blake
Guru
Joined: 16 Sep 2007
Posts: 323
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| Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2012 8:31 pm Post subject: |
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It's funny... I wanted to move from Gentoo to Arch a couple of moths ago, but after entering the forums to ask for some opinions, I got the go-read-the-documentation response  That turned me off. I love the Gentoo community for the open support. Even if I ask a basic question, I at least get a link in the response, not the google-it answer. |
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swathe
n00b
Joined: 04 Jul 2011
Posts: 26
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| Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2012 11:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Gabriel_Blake wrote: | | It's funny... I wanted to move from Gentoo to Arch a couple of moths ago, but after entering the forums to ask for some opinions, I got the go-read-the-documentation response That turned me off. I love the Gentoo community for the open support. Even if I ask a basic question, I at least get a link in the response, not the google-it answer. |
I use arch and Gentoo, but I quoted this because I have to agree. What strikes me as funny as gentoo has this reputation as well and it couldn't be further from the truth. I never really had many problems with Arch but have read countless posts where people I think were asking legit questions. I am still a big fan of arch, but Gentoo is definitely my preferred OS
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smartass
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Joined: 04 Jul 2011
Posts: 65
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| Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2012 1:53 pm Post subject: |
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WARNING! This is not intended as a flame ! I think of it as a more detailed write up for people asking in the future. But yeah, it may contain a bit of sarcasm too 
Today I had a revelation: I may have been misinterpreting the comma in the Arch underlying principle - KISS
As you may or may not know, The Arch Way can be summarized by the popular acronym KISS = keep it simple, stupid. However, the meaning of the comma between the words "simple" and "stupid" may be ambiguous.
I'm not a professor of the English language, but normally I interpret the comma as a delimiter from the part addressing someone referred to as "stupid"
But in this case, I think I was wrong. All the tools provided in Arch (well, the alpm library has grown a lot, but the design is still relatively simple) are really simple, but this imposes many difficulties when you are not trying achieve something simple, e.g. downgrading libraries on which many other packages depend and/or rebuilding them with ABS, soname bumps with IgnorePkg, config file management, optdepends management, control sums management.
For all these problems solutions exist of course, but they are beyond simple in terms of the actions needed to be taken and require a lot of time.
I used to encounter them quite often whenever I was deviating from the default Arch policies, e.g. trying to freeze some core stuff vs. fast-paced rolling-release. But when I stayed within the boundaries, yes, downloading and installing a package was often a matter of seconds which I really enjoyed.
So, my conclusion is that the comma in this case stands for enumeration and for the sake of unambiguity
should be performed.
And where does Gentoo stand? Well, the underlying design isn't really that simple, but it does enable me to find very simple solutions to problems that I found very time consuming in the Arch reign.
- downgrading -> echo category/package-version >> /etc/portage/package.mask ; emerge -aNDu world; revdep-rebuild
- soname bumps -> revdep-rebuild
- config file management -> dispatch-conf
- optedepends -> flaggie package +/- flag
- manually downloading sources and control sums calculation for PKGBUILD entry-> ebuild package-version.ebuild manifest
You say that (re)building the packages will take about the same time that I would spend with editing PKGBUILDs, running makepkg in the right order on each one of them and finding and editing/diffing *.pacnew files? Yes you're right. But there is a big difference:
I can just issue some of those commands above once and simply walk away. |
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