What do you NOT like about Gentoo?

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

yes and yes. Luckily we have a local mirror. Sadly not everything is on that mirror...
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audiodef · Posted: Fri Oct 17, 2008 7:36 pm Post subject:

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

of course - kde only notifies you when a kde app crashes.
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quag7 · Posted: Fri Oct 17, 2008 9:42 pm Post subject:

What I don't like about Gentoo is that the install doesn't sync to The Dark Side of the Moon.

For one, it is too long. I can get all the way from Piper through Animals, at least, before it finishes, and it syncs with none of it.

All those clock alarms going off at once at the beginning of Time? Compiler output.
On the run? Compiler output.
Great Gig in the Sky? Compiler output.

Very uninspiring. I have tried this drunk, high, suspended on meat hooks over the sea, freebasing Ajax cleanser, sniffing glue, shooting mucilage, and still -- nothing of significance. I even tried fdisking to Echoes once, just to see. A whole lot of nothing. mke2fs -j barely doesn't even get me to the "Overhead the albatross" bit. Very limp.

At the same time, I can sync a Windows defrag to Side 3 of The Wall and it's COMPLETELY FREAKING AWESOME. Also I once Fatal Exception Errored during that "Bleating and babbling I fell on his neck with a scream" bit in Sheep. That was *FREAKING AMAZING*. I was tripping balls at the time. On 250 mics of Mark Shuttleworth's ego. I saw God. He looked a like Peter Stormare, the head nihilist from The Big Lebowski.

Anyway if I have one Gentoo complaint, this is most definitely it.

Otherwise, you know, I sync. I upgrade. Sometimes things break. Then I fix them. Usually it tells me I need a USE flag or something, or a revdep-rebuild fixes it. More of the same. Year six!

(EDIT: One time I did sync a Barry Manilow album to a "GENTOO IS DYING" thread on the forums here. But I won't go into that because I believe that pornography is off-topic.)
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audiodef · Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2008 2:40 am Post subject:

quag7 wins the "Most Interesting Post" award.

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Hypnos · Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2008 8:21 am Post subject:

Sprotte · Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2008 12:09 pm Post subject:

Hypnos · Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2008 1:22 pm Post subject:

sprotte,

I use cfg-update (supports both Portage and Paludis). Doesn't make it a pleasure to keep up with config files, but better than the alternatives I've tried.

As for the other stuff, GNOME 3 is in the works (I use GNOME primarily, not KDE), and also using GNUstep I follow Etoile closely.
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Sprotte · Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2008 4:00 pm Post subject:

Etoile looks interesting. At least they have a vision.

I was bored enough today to install pkgcore. I was pleasantly surprised that it's a small download, is a drop-in replacement, is faster (well, pmerge is) than portage, and seems to Just Work. Some things are still missing, so I'll keep using Portage, but pkgcore is impressive. The search tool (at least on full description searches) and cache regen are just as unspeakably slow as Portage's though. That hints at a systemic error (database problem). No match for FreeBSD's. I didn't see reverse dependencies either.

Well, at leat something is happening.

Joseph_sys · Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2008 6:06 pm Post subject:

Certain packages version, especially from VOIP (net-misc) are getting obsolete and users are forced to select newer onces from overlays like Asterisk 1.4
OpenSIPS doesn't even exist in overlays.

I wish Gentoo was more up-to date with these packages

jonnevers · Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2008 6:08 pm Post subject:

Sprotte · Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2008 6:59 pm Post subject:

I'm comparing pkgcore 0.4.7.12 with the latest stable portage, 2.1.4.5.

Even if the latest ~x86 portage is faster, I seriously doubt it would be 200% faster at calculating dependencies. The sync and regen aren't noticeably faster with pkgcore, but supposedly it scales really well with multiple CPUs (which I don't have).

pquery is also a lot faster than emerge -s/-S, it's not absolutely fair to compare since pquery's output isn't as verbose (it doesn't show license, latest installed version etc, only short description, repo and such). It's clear that it's faster though.

Some stuff's still missing, too.

onefriedrice · n00b Joined: 26 Aug 2007 Posts: 57

sasq · Apprentice Joined: 09 Sep 2005 Posts: 234 Location: Poland

From the most annoying:

1. Portage speed.
Every subsequent version works slower than previous one when searching for package and its dependencies. If I first want to only display the dependency tree and see what USE flags are there, and then making changes to USE flags to see what will be sucked as dependencies additionally, it takes too much time - every particular display mills the HDD again from the start, even if it had found the same package a while ago.
During the compilation - yes, you can minimize console and do other things, but the compilation process uses so much CPU power that other things are quite hard to do. All the system slows down. There should be some way to prioritize the emerge.

2. Portage disk space.
Why every user is forced to maintain the WHOLE portage tree on his HDD if he uses maybe 1% of it at once? Wouldn't it be better if there were only one global portage tree [and maybe some mirrors of it] on the distro servers, where they could be queried remotely? E.g. if I want to emerge package X, emerge command could query the server about the package and its dependencies and then download what's needed.
It could additionaly save time and bandwidth of Gentoo servers, because updating the local tree won't be needed then. The tree would be up-to-date all the time since it's on the global server.
Of course, for the needs of networkless installation, the local tree could be used if it's there, which would take precedence then.

3. Portage evolution.
Too slow. Other distros already have packages, which are not accessible on Gentoo in a standard way. One have to use overlays and stuff to circumvent this. It's probably the most often mentioned drawback.

4. Portage dependencies and unmerging.
Already mentioned. Portage doesn't prevent from unmerging packages which are vital for other packages. It could break a big hole in one's system by accident. Before removing the package, it should display what other packages depend on it and would break, and then let the user decide [force remove of this package only, remove the dependant packages too, etc.].

5. USE flags descriptions.
Some flags are describet poorly. What a description it is for e.g. a "xyz" flag wchich goes: "XYZ support"?

Oh please, I can know THAT one by myself from the flag's name!

But it doesn't enlighten me any further. I still have to type that "XYX" on Google to see what's that enigmatic "XYZ" and what it means for that one particular package.

6. Binary packages.
Even if Gentoo's idea was to compile everything from sources, there isn't probably anything in Portage which might prevent it from using it to emerge binary packages. Some of them are in Portage already. Still it has to fetch it, unpack, launch some tools on it [no difference it's the compiler or something else] and install it. It still has to deal with dependencies. So what is the problem to have it both?

7. Manuals.
Even if Gentoo Handbook is great and contain many information, it would be good to clean it a little for a user who comes to Gentoo first time and doesn't know what he should do, which ISO he should download and why, what's the choice for desktop environments etc. FreeBSD Handbook is better in it, because the knowledge there is more structured. Gentoo Handbook seems like one of those old RPG games where you're reading about current event, choosing one of several options and go to the specified paragraph number to see what happens next.
OTOH I really appreciate HOWTOs from Gentoo Wiki, because they're more task-oriented and generally well explained.
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yabbadabbadont · Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 1:33 am Post subject:

Hypnos · Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 2:03 am Post subject:

sasq,

2. Play with rsync excludes using RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS in your make.conf. But you may get weird unsatisfied dependencies if you exclude the wrong thing. Anyway, I find that with a fast hard disk it's not worth it -- searches are reasonably quick, and I have a cron script do my syncs at night while I'm asleep.

Remote queries would be a bad idea -- much more bandwidth would be used querying than syncing once/{day, week}. Think of your local Portage tree as a local cache.

3. It's much more hassle to make sure things compile cleanly on a variety of systems with various tools and USE flags, than simply creating binaries for certain targets and with options you control. Part of the problem is that many major software packages (e.g., GNOME) are designed for binary distribution, not easy source distribution, so they have a mess of switches that don't all play nicely together and circular dependencies.

4. Paludis has this feature; hopefully Portage will have it soon.

5. Agreed.

6. Large packages like OpenOffice are already offered in binary format; not a big time-saver with smaller packages on a reasonably new machine. Also, if you deviate from the USE flags used for binary distribution, you'll have to build from source anyway.

7. Unlike BSD, there are more novice-friendly Linux distros out there. Certainly, for power users the Gentoo handbook is quite friendly.

That said, FreeBSD's documentation is the best I've ever seen for an open source project. Maybe because they have coherent design philosophy and top-down governance ... Gentoo is merely a distribution, so a variety of tools can get any specific job done, and what these tools are change over time.
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Sprotte · Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 11:52 am Post subject:

Hypnos · Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 1:06 pm Post subject:

blandoon · Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 9:03 pm Post subject:

What don't I like?

Not the first or last time I'll say this, but: It should be an absolute requirement for every package to list, in detail, what each USE flag actually does for that package. The global list is no help - for example, the "mp3" flag says something like "Enables MP3 support." Well, no kidding, Sherlock. But what does that mean? If I don't flip it will I not be able to listen to MP3s? What does it do, for which packages, and what are the consequences? These are things you don't find out about until you try to do something, and it doesn't work, and you find out from forum posts that you should have set the "tralfaz" flag before compiling 30 packages.

Most of my gripes have already been listed by others. Slowness to incorporate packages into the stable tree, poor portage performance... I hear portage 2.2 is better, but it's not stable yet (see 1).

...and in the interest of equal time, what do I like?

I like that I can keep the system up-to-date on a rolling basis without ever having to "upgrade" as you would with e.g. Fedora or OpenSUSE or Ubuntu.

I like having some control over what is installed. Every open-source OS has its version of "dependency hell," but with Gentoo, by controlling USE flags carefully, you can remove stuff you don't use, which means removing potential dependency problems.

Also, I've learned a lot about Linux in general by using Gentoo.
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ppurka · Advocate Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 3256

Hypnos · Posted: Mon Oct 20, 2008 3:46 am Post subject:

tylerwylie · Posted: Mon Oct 20, 2008 5:04 am Post subject:

The one thing I would like to see in Gentoo is a better version of genkernel I guess. A precompiled kernel that doesn't require a long time genkernel compile or a manual build. That's just me being lazy though.

d2_racing · Posted: Mon Oct 20, 2008 3:51 pm Post subject:

blandoon · Posted: Mon Oct 20, 2008 7:16 pm Post subject:

tylerwylie · Posted: Tue Oct 21, 2008 12:15 am Post subject: