I'd like to say I disagree. I'd like to say it, but I'm not sure I can, because I'm not sure I get the point.

Are you saying that we shouldn't be "box thinkers"? Show me someone who isn't, and I'll show you a bigger box.

It certainly can be admirable when a person chooses to swallow his pride and to suppress his own opinion (for whatever reason, although such sacrifice frequently goes unnoticed).

Unfortunately the "infighting" problem seen with mature open-source projects is not just a matter of differing opinions. It's a problem of rudeness. Animals fight to physically disable their opponents, but humans attack emotions (especially over the Internet, where the physical is inaccessible).

In my opinion, competition is a good thing for society and has its place. For humans that place should be intellectual debates, sports and games. If your goal is to win the game, do all you can within the rules to win, but if your goal is to forward (say, for example) the Gentoo project, then don't beat down your opponent emotionally, because while that may make it harder for him to prove his point, it does nothing positive towards your goal.

Wolf, I understand how frustrating it is to lose time with senseless fighting. If that's your point, then I wholeheartedly agree; however, not all fights are senseless. That's my point.

Brilliant post, man! Well said.

I dig your cynically inclined sense of meta-irony. (c8=

Beers!

Well, for example, looking away when somebody fumbles with bugzie and produces unnecessary noise is being nice :)

Not sure what exactly I did, but you're welcome for it. =)

I agree!
I think AJAX is... hackish. It may produce pretty pages, but logically it's a mess. Don't feel bad. This sort of thing happens. Too many people with great influence with little knowledge of what they are actually doing.

I have tried distcc, but got burned and dropped it.

It worked if you had _exactly_ the same machines with the same libraries etc.

Once there was disparity betwwen them, distcc would produce bad results.

It could even be a simple case of not emerge-uDp ing glibc on all machines at the same moment.

These problems might be fixed by now, but I'm not eager to try again. My Opterons are quite capable of doing this alone, so there is no problem, while all slower machines are alone- I don't have more similar machines on-line to make a group.

Mixing dissimilar (32/64 bit) machines in the distcc group seems like a bad idea.
Sure, it should work in theory, but this is Gentoo and too many things could go wrong...

Branko,

Four days for compilation is not that surprising in my experience. I have an older Pentium 4 1.5GHz Dell Dimension 8100 (without hyperthreading) that used to house Windows Me. I have been running Gentoo now on this machine for the past three-four years. Everytime there is a major upgrade whether it be Gnome or X11, several days of compilation have been the rule. I suspect it would be much faster with a more modern processor. I will be replacing this machine with a new Intel Core Duo Extreme machine with a 2.9 GHz processor. I will try a Gentoo install on it when it arrives. I hope I get a significant speed up in compilation. One other thing that may help is distributed compilation if you have another computer handy. I have read about it but have never tried it. I am thinking of installing Puppy Linux on the older machine to keep it usable.

Something Microsoft does in their installers (eg for Exchange) is present it as an HTML page and put checkboxes next to the items you need to do. You check them as you do each item. It doesn't enforce that they have to be checked (some Javascript could do that). It may be worthwhle doing something similar for the HTML install guide.

Re: 2006.0 and installer:

I know one can stil do it old way, but how to do this is not obvious. Stages are somewhere else ( IIRC stage3 is autogenerated from packages on CD), documentation is somewhere else etc. And there is no README on obvious place for this, explaining the changes and new rules...

What good is some functionality, even _IF_ it works, when it isn't appropriately documented ?

As it is, 2006.0 is done with new installers in mind, with distant possibility of manual install, as if the new installers ( curses and gui) are tested, reliable, sure thing.

But they are far from it. I have had installer croak because it couldn't mount the partitions it created and formated itself ! Not even with default settings !

I have tried it on:

-Dual Opteron -64 bit Gentoo
-P4
-P4M in toshiba laptop
-AMD Athlon XP (2700 ?) and Sempron
-IIRC also VIA EPIA M10000 (C3 on 1GHz)

I couldn't _NEVER_ complete the (GUI or curses ) install, on none of the machines above, even with default settings.

Funny part is, after 2006.0 came out there were many "BRAVO!!! It works 100.000%" posts and practically no critical or warning feedback. Almost like just about everyone else using Gentoo lives in another universe-until you talk "in flesh" with other Linux users on the matter of "Why not Gentoo ?" and realise you are not alone, far from it...

BTW: One of my machines with Gentoo( P4- 1.6 GHz@1.8 GHz) wasn't used for maybe a bit under a year, so when I found a new use for it, I decided it's time for an update...

It's emerging stuff for a _FOURTH_DAY_ now. Sure, its speed is not exactly stellar, and there were quite a few packages, and i decided to recompile everything with gcc-4.1.1 and optionally ( where 4.1.1 croakes) with 3.4.6, but FOUR DAYS ? ;o/

With EPIA and similar machines, situation is even worse. If one is serious about using this as a desktop machine, he should either:

- compile SW for it on some fast machine
- have one EPIA doing just emerging of everything new and then "steal" finished binpkgs from "real-work" machines
-stay with old versions of programs for long time and never do emerge -uD world
- use poor EPIA just for compiling stuff without the time to really use it...

@Greg:

I ewasn't looking for sympathy, I was offering feedback, as I have understood, that was the OP was asking about. This means ignoring for the moment the things that rock and exposing and focusing on the the things that suck...

Obviously, there are good things in Gentoo, or I wouldn't be using it exclusively for last few years. But this thread is about exposing difficulties with using Gentoo.

Is Gentoo difficult to use ? It _SURE_ can be, and it is from time to time. No way around that. For me, it is still head and shoulders above anything else in Linux world, but that does not make life with it any easier.

@frilled, RE:VMware

Judging the quality of the installer based on an installation within VMware is a bit like cheating. If the hardware and software already work on the machine on which you are running vmware, then they will almost certainly work within your virtual machine regardless of the distribution. With that said, my guess is the Graphical installer will hang at some point and then fail even within vmware. I actually think the graphical installer is a praiseworthy goal, but right now it is broken.

@Branko:

Unfortunately, you are not going to get much sympathy or objectivity here. Most everyone who will happen upon this site will already be running Gentoo, and will be a fan. I actually agree with your main thrust that Portage, for all its usefulness, does frequently result in borked systems. It may not be portage per se, but the ebuilds. This occurs even when upgrading packages marked stable. I have learned my lesson to stay clear of the packages marked testing-->nothing but heartache in that path. The only testing package I run is the kernel (ck-sources).

With regard to the 2006.0 installer, I also have not gotten the graphical installer to work for me. However, you are mistaken about there not being a stage 3. There is. Also, if you, don't want to work with GUI installer you can just open a terminal and do a "killall gdm". This will take you to the "classic" Gentoo cli. Gentoo remains fun for tinkering, and I suppose if you are a developer Gentoo allows you to very precisely control the libraries and othe packages on your system. Personally, the knowledge I have gained about my hardware has made my Gentoo experience worthwhile.

@frilled:

I see you're still not past the stage of denial. Not good against any addiction ;o)

Re: Installation Docs

I recall my first install.. it did go fine.. but I have stuffed up other installs resulting from skipped instruction lines. :)

Suggestion: How about adding a tick box at the end of each line of install documentation? ..and/or some fancy javascript to change the background to a different colour?

The user is less likely to skip a step if they come back to the install page and easily see where they are at.

Branko, it's not wearing me down, and I have various generations of servers up and running .-) In fact I'd have a lot more gray hair if I wasn't running Gentoo here (or I'd still be on yesterday's software under RHEL3 or something like that).

I have actually installed from a 2006.0 release, but using the minimal CD, since Internet connection isn't really a problem here. But you made me curious about the graphical installer, I guess I should try it in a VMware ... maybe the 2006.1 test drive, though.

Before writing that, you _really_ should try graphical installer on 2006.0 ;o)
Boy, what a crap. Not only that, but there is no obvious way to do it manually, 2005.1-way.

No docs at the expected place, no stage3, nothing...

When you have a couple of generations of machines on the same place and Gentoo on all of them, things begin to wear you off. If you are not updating one machine, you are troubleshooting the other(s).

For all its utility value, Portage is just a bunch of scripts, which evolved slowlu over last a couple years. Sure, it changed, but it is now what it supposed to be at the beginning, nothing more.

Also, Portage seems to be like a working horse in the fact that it doesn't like to backtrack at all. Try unmerging some complex package (like kde) and keep Portage from emerging it at every next update, for example.

I'm not a dev, so take this with a grain of salt, but I don't think your comments are out of line at all. Volunteer-based or not, I don't know any people who can stand up and say, "there's nothing we can do better than we do now." This applies to virtually every avenue of life.

Software development might be the first concern, but the development of good practices and processes shouldn't be overlooked or disregarded as less important. Security could even be improved by more planning and more auditing before something is released into the tree, just by that small act of being more careful.

Like I said, though, i'm not a dev. It just seems common sense to tread lightly and be thoughtful rather than reactionary and quick to decide...as long as it's not at a Debian pace :p

Excellent assessment of Gentoo. I think I more or less agree with everything here :)