I am not a Gentoo Dev, just an enthusiastic Gentoo user. I have thought for a while that the only way Gentoo can scale will be as a meta-distro.

What do I mean by that? I mean that Gentoo concentrates on setting up and maintaining a really good set of relationships with upstream, and Devs should shares best practice with each other about how to get things done.

Now downstream from Gentoo there can be lots of different types of people, some will be your portage users (and the users of those other trendy things), while others will be binary distributions themselves - targeting embedded platforms or more downstream end users.

These mini or not so mini distros will use a subset of Gentoo as a base, they will not need their own relationships upstream as Gentoo has abstracted this away.

One of these mini-distros may be a team who provide a really integrated desktop like Ubuntu, while another team might provide a really stable server, there may be loads of embedded and application type systems, etc, etc.

So my other point is that Portage is very flat, with the only distinctions are stable, unstable, masked or out in an overlay. I think this will not be sustainable forever, there will need to be oriented divisions - i.e. the core desktop set, web apps, and so on. I think processor architecture is something that can be abstracted away even more than already.

So I disagree with you a little there. In a meta-distro age, MIPS, ARM and all that will be really important.

Hi, this is really good piece of vision. You are right that there is lack of direction. I have to say I agree to most of what you've written, let me get through a bit other point of view on gentoo.

I love gentoo, but I spend to much of my time just building it. What I miss is some rapid deployment of gentoo. Not everybody enjoys compiling from source especially when you have multiple gentoo boxes deployed and mostly you compile the same stuff all the time. Hence focus on binary packages is important. At the moment with my friend we built some scripts and processes around gentoo that allows us to have two compiling machines and many binary-only deployed machines. But it is not polished and cumbersome in many ways (and I'm sure others have done it better). For example we hit hard problems when we needed different flags per machine. No fun there.

This problem led me back to gentoo mailing lists and the discovery of paludis and all the not so cool status of current gentoo development at the moment. From my point of view, there are some devs that are not behaving accordingly to others view of nice a polite behavior. Ok. But I see they are also trying to do some nice things like write alternative to portage and fix current issues gentoo have. Btw complete rewrite of apps from zero once in a time is a good practice. I couldn't even finish reading the thread based on which Daniel decided to leave again, to me that thread was about arguing about small things. But lets skip this my incomplete picture of things.

Another thing I miss is virtualization in gentoo. Would it be possible to somehow project gentoo that some core system (lets say XEN or KVM enabled) exits and then there are binary stage4s (again XEN or KVM enabled) ready to be deployed with customized setup? This means webserver, intranet server ( apache+wiki+ldap ready), backend server (samba+printing+LDAP+MAIL......), you name it. I guess here it is almost perfectly aligned with overlays.

all the best

I couldn't find your email, so I'll ask here. What about the scenario where one wants to install 2 subprojects (audio and video seam to be closely related, not to mention if those 2 are totaly different)? I know that theoreticly it is posible to manage all that, but I'm more concerned about dependencies and blocking packages that can arise. Is there any plan for that? Thanx!

@Diego: did you follow what really happened? Basically, mozilla is refusing to make any exceptions for debian (it used to) and want to totally control how their trademark is used. While this *can* make sense in the wild world, I don't see the point in suspecting debian people of hurting the mozilla trademark (their patches are for things that should be fixed upstream, like support for more arches or possibility to disable the automatic upgrade system). And even if for some mysterious reason, that was to happen, they could act afterwards and take whatever measure they see fit, instead of this silly prevention.

And did I ever say that everyone should stop using firefox? I said that I stopped using it, for reasons that I have explained, but everyone is free to choose a browser they like and I totally respect that choice.

I find really funny that it's the _debian_ folks who want to use the firefox trademark freely.

I mean, "debian" is also a registered trademark _AND_ they've enforced it against debian-derived distros some times.

But now mozilla is the only "bad guy" here.

And of course, every linux users should stop using firefox because the firefox project gives more priority to the win32 platform than linux, but everybody should jump to epiphany...despite of the fact that epiphany doesn't even cares to support win32.

Firefox is too slow for me. I use Opera. All I miss is the possibility to watch streams.
-Firefox is often not responding when I open about 20Tabs.:(
And most important -Opera doesnt reload a page every time I hit back(Does a site change withing seconds?)
-Opera increases the size of pages perfectly and even better than what I saw with IE7 @ my father's laptop.

I switched too from firefox2->epiphany (ffx2 broke almost all my extensions minus webdevel)

now i install konqueror :)
Also opera and links are great for me

Mozilla Corp did a "good" thing with iceweasel/Firefox icon controversy , now we are looking at alternatives (like sylpheed,evolution for email)
Open source is good

About the forms, that's a known bug in KDE, see bug 130160:

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=130160

About the tabs, the KDE Session Manager does take care of that, which is part of kdebase (which you don't have installed it seems). The other way is to use profiles, like Niko suggested.

@Niko: thanks, this is what I was looking for!

Tabs can be easily saved by typing Ctrl+Alt+S and Enter (or just go Tools -> Profile stuff). Don't remember if that shortcut works on default, though. Anyway, you save the session before you quit and continue from there the next time. :)

Uhm, I changed firefox for opera a couple of months ago. I really love it!

Maybe I should try konkqueror, since I just like you didn't want to install because I didn't use KDE :)

Regards,
Alex

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