Gentoo is getting almost impossible to keep working...

[cayenne]

Just venting here...but WOW.

I've been using Gentoo since about 2002. And used to have relatively little problems with keeping a working system.

I'd been away from it for a few years...and something has just drastically changed...dunno if it is so much more complex or what. But anytime I have a Gentoo box, that seems to go for greater than 4mos without an update of world or system...it is almost impossible to bring the darned thing back up to date.

Every time I seem to do an update world....I have tons of cr@p that is blocked, have to weed through all of those....if there is a kde update in the mix, that is another headache...
I just discovered this new autounmask thing, and found out on a forum that you really don't want to use the USE flags in make.conf anymore.....etc, etc etc.

I dunno...like I said, just seemed to be easier to maintain a Gentoo system, emerge packages you wanted, dependencies taken care of by the system 99% of the time. But these days, if I emerge world....something blows up...which after researching and asking on forums, leads to finding something else blowing up (run a rev-dep rebuild, and something there won't work and have to troubleshoot those dependencies)..

Is it just me?

Thanks for letting me vent...

cayenne
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[BradN]

I think it has gotten a bit worse lately, but at least there's still solutions for most of the problems. Unfortunately gentoo exposes a lot of the crap the developers have to deal with as various ways of doing things are changed that would normally be hidden from the users in most other distros, and I think there's been more of that stuff happening behind the scenes lately. Hopefully the dust starts to settle soon and things will get more stable in general.

[krinn]

Ask yourself: What could makes gentoo so harder than ubuntu ? Nothing they share everything, same applications, kernel... all linux distro have few differences, the biggest ones could be resume to: package manager and init.

But with use flags, gentoo introduce choices, choices that could affect big time how is your distro, a user with a use flag won't have the same application as another user. Still application share the same name, but options could be really different, and how the application run might be greatly altered.
When in ubuntu, nope, users will have their applications build the same, with the same config, same options. Just a mirror from others users.
So if you don't want put hands in grease, use ubuntu, if something happen, reinstall the application and reset the application config file and you're back to start. Problem solved!
For gentoo, your application is your application, even another gentoo user have it, those many choices he made, and the many ones you've made endup with finally he have his gentoo, you have your gentoo, but your gentoo isn't his gentoo, so nobody else than you should be able to really understand how to handle it.
Finally, as it's now easy to see why ubuntu don't need real documentation, as the distro click yes everywhere for you, answer always the same answers to the same questions for you, to finally endup with the same distro as john doe. Easy. Devs are the admin of the user distro taking choice for them.
While gentoo need a more user aware of its distro, because nobody than him should be more aware of what he has choose and why he has made these choices. This imply more in deep knowledge, and gentoo users are just saved because even others gentoo users don't have the same distro as them, they have a good in deep knowledge that don't scare them and they are more train at solving them because they sometimes need also to look under the roof to handle their distro. You are your own distro admin.

Hopefully for them, ubuntu have more devs and users number, this increase chance to have a good answer to a problem, else they would just face the "did you reinstall the package ?" everytime they have a problem.
Hopefully for gentoo users, other gentoo users have a good knowledge of their distro, else if gentoo users count only on a small percent of "skilled" users, they will get very few answers. And you'll just have to browse the forum to see how many devs we have with spare time to help users.

Some users just don't want pay the prize for the choices. And when they fall on a problem nobody can help them solve, they give up and wrote a dumb thread that gentoo is a sinking ship and 4 years is enought and all this crap like if others users care about their life, and like we're going to say "wowwww, yep that user gentoo wasn't working! holly crap, i'll uninstall my distro too because it sucks that this user cannot have a working distro".

It's ok for me if a user don't want pay the prize, he can just switch to ubuntu, but like all distros, he will face again that he will need to pay a prize, a different one, but still it's not free. And it might not be a prize he is also ready to pay. The non-choice prize, the "hey i have install vlc but it cannot read abcd music ?"->"yes vlc cannot"->"but vlc have a new module to read abcd music now"->"yep but our version wasn't build with it, but it's ok very few user use it"

And then, here comes again the "i'm back!" thread, like, still, if we care about their life and still like we will say "Woooo joy, he is back, i will resintall gentoo too !".

So no, it might not be just you, but it's the prize for that distro, portage is the packager of gentoo, not its admin.
Seem you've just forget it.

It's good to vent you're right ! I'm really happy about my part against the "I'm done/I'm back" threads
And i have nothing against ubuntu or its users (maybe just assuming the average user is totally unware of what is gcc, but it's a generally and i might be wrong) , but it's clearly the first linux distro so it's a good target to take as example. It just comes from previous old experience with redhat when i was getting stuck at building something because they were using a fucking gcc that nobody support as it was so badly patch nothing could be build with it and the application of course wasn't build with the option i need. This is still why i'm not ready to get back to binary distro.

[Chiitoo]

I have been using Gentoo soon a year, and it was my first distribution I really ever used, learned Linux with, and have been using as my main OS ever since.

I have not really had any big issues at all.
I did migrate to Baselayout-2 before it went 'stable' though so that might have saved me from some sudden troubles, and on top of that, I am a bit addicted to checking for updates nearly daily, so I don't know how bad it can be after months of no updates at all personally.

That said, I read a lot of the more experienced users saying that you can still let it wait for quite a long time without any big issues, but I am quite certain the time-frame is pretty much elastic, and changes all the time.


Just saying: I have not had problems (yet?), really, but I do update things frequently. And I have not noticed many updates that could have become an issue for a long time now. Of course, I can imagine if few or more bigger changes come up at once, it could get rough.
I hope you can get over those you have been encountering, and can continue having fun with Gentoo. :]
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[DaggyStyle]

[kimmie]

I understand what you're saying.

I'm a long-time gentoo user, but if I had a fixed-function box (say a NAS) which I wanted to just work with as little fuss as possible, all the time, I'd use CentOS with it's four-year lifecycle.

I'm sure some folks would disagree with me, but I think you have to want to and enjoy tinkering to use Gentoo. I quite like the updates, they make me learn stuff. But four months is unrealistic; there's only so much change the developers can isolate you from, and there have been some big changes that have hit stable over the last while.

The way I deal with updates is to have a box --sync itself every week, and email me the results of an --update --pretend --verbose. When that list looks big enough, I do the update.

[VinzC]

[BitJam]

[cayenne]

[Hypnos]

IMHO, Gentoo has gotten simpler, upstream has gotten more complicated.

I make my life easier by running as lean a system as possible:

* Start with generic profile, only enable USE flags for stuff I use

* I use the stable tree unless I need a specific package in testing

* XFCE instead of GNOME

* No deep updates unless a package version disappears from Portage (easy to see with "cave report" under Paludis)

I use Gentoo for both my laptop and my computational server, both of which I use for work. I have a cron job that runs once/week to tell me the state of my system vis-a-vis the Portage tree.
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[tomk]

Moved from Other Things Gentoo to Gentoo Chat as it's about Gentoo itself rather than a support request.
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[aidanjt]

Latest Gentoo fail for me? Graphviz wont build. Without fail, every install I do, some package gets stabilised which shouldn't even be on the tree.
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[McGruff]

[cayenne]

[McGruff]

Give me a week so I can tidy it up, make sure it'll work robustly on other systems, and then write an ebuild.

[Ant P.]

That seems like an awful lot of work for something that would be a one-liner using btrfs snapshots.

[cayenne]

[McGruff]

I'll need to look into that. Not everyone will be using BTRFS of course. The main thing is to get up and running again as quickly and simply as possible, however it's implemented.

[djdunn]

Its the nature of the beast unfortunately. Gentoo is much more akin to "linux from source" than any quote unquote "distro" its not too bad if your doing daily or weekly updates, but when you go do it 2-3 times a year? your basically upgrading a distro, not even the binary distro's try to do that.

As these systems and services and dependencies and user base gets more complex with more options and choices, features, and all that jazz its going to get harder and harder and harder to do the 3 times a year upgrades.

its just simply the nature of the beast
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“Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the Universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good and just and beautiful.”

― Plato

[VinzC]

[djdunn]

You could even cron an emerge --sync, and emerge -uDavtNp world, and have that output automatically emailed to you, so you get a nice little email you can read telling you what needs upgraded too.
_________________
“Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the Universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good and just and beautiful.”

― Plato

[VinzC]

[steveL]

btrfs is still in heavy development. Can't lvm do snapshots?

[VinzC]

[McGruff]