Expectations Too High?

Snoopster77 · Posted: Mon Aug 26, 2002 2:47 am Post subject: Expectations Too High?

<disclaimer statement="I'm not trying to troll"/>

For the best part of a year now I had been faithfully checking the progress of debian. Needless to say I got bored. Then I found Gentoo and tried it out. Initially I thought great, no RPM management hell and optimized binaries.

However, just lately I have come across a number of times where ebuilds are totally screwed. I was also a victim of the cups 1.1.15 problem. While the help on offer at this forum as a whole is awesome, it seems to me that there is probably not enough testing done prior to making a new ebuild available.

Am I alone in this opinion? Is Gentoo simply not as strick when it comes to testing as Debian? Are Gentoo users more like guinea pigs? Don't get me wrong, I'm not bagging Gentoo, just trying to discover mroe about it.

rommel · Posted: Mon Aug 26, 2002 4:03 am Post subject:

well it can be a bit frustrating i guess but then you dont have to update immediately when a new ebuild appears, there is no garuntee that RH or Mandrake rpms are flawless...debian enjoys more stability cuz it runs 5 years behind...lol

Valen · Posted: Mon Aug 26, 2002 4:44 am Post subject:

I think Gentoo has a different goal, it support all the latest and greatest and expects the users to fix what is necessary to get the most out of their system. But due to the amazing documentation and forums even people like me can start messing around with it.
Debian seems much more geared towards mainstream users, although having the unstable and testing branches opens up some access to the new toys.

I tend to run Gentoo for most of my work but I have Slackware lurking in a partition somewhere in the background to come to my rescue if I need it, so far I've managed to get everything working with at most a couple of days effort.

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Also, a 'stable' version of Gentoo may be released. Don't hold your breath though. If one is released, it won't be released until it is ready.
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masseya · Posted: Mon Aug 26, 2002 6:41 am Post subject:

I think the best thing that can be said about gentoo is that it's being compared frequently to the 'big' binary distributions. Those typically have better interfaces than from-source distributions because they know all the answers to all the questions about the system before the user ever touches it. As far as the from-source distributions goes, gentoo has the best interface and allows the most controls in the smartest manner. It's so much better than most from-source distributions that it doesn't warrant a comparison in most cases. Anyone think I'm biased?

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wickidpisa · n00b Joined: 21 Jul 2002 Posts: 27

Gentoo users are guinea pigs, but they are for the most part very willing ones, I know I am. Most people prefer the term "beta tester" to guinea pig though. Gentoo may have reached and passed 1.0, but most devs will tell you that it is still very much a beta distro. Gentoo is still quite young as a distro, you can not expect perfection 10 times faster than any other distro.

But even given Gentoo's problems, I would still rather use it than any distro out there. I'm not going to run it on production servers, but it is good enough for my personal use right now. If no one uses it how will the bugs ever get fixed?

pointwood · n00b Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 11

I would like to see stable/unstable versions of some kind released.

Right now it's probably a good idea to wait a few days before installing new ebuilds, to make sure they have been properly tested. Check the forum and/or irc to see if anyone have had problems with that ebuild.
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maw · Posted: Mon Aug 26, 2002 9:08 am Post subject:

I always wait a while before installing something large and/or critical to see if it's causing any problems, but on the whole I've found Gentoo to be more stable than Mandrake. But that might be because I have a habit of breaking RPM-based distros almost immediately :twisted:

I suppose we are beta testers in a lot of ways, but I wouldn't have it any other way. My Gentoo system is the happiest Linux I have ever run. Yes, some ebuilds don't work, but then if you were installing from source manually, some still wouldn't work, and you wouldn't have any dependency resolution either. As long as we accept that ebuilds aren't guarenteed to work, it's fine I think.

As an example, I had some big problems with the Glasgow Haskell Compiler ebuild, as it wouldn't compile from intermediate C sources, it needed GHC already installed (paradox!). The manual install from C sources of GHC is a horrible thing to do, but happily I was able to contact the ebuild maintainer and he fixed the problem. The joys of open source...
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