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PaulBredbury
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Joined: 14 Jul 2005
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 Posted: Sat Nov 17, 2007 6:28 am Post subject: |
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| desultory wrote: | | eclasses should not impede those starting to write ebuilds. |
Unfortunately, they do anyway. As proof, look at the number of Gentoo users, then look at the number of Gentoo users who submit patches to ebuilds. Look at the hundreds who moan about xmms without writing a single line of code.
If you're saying that "simple" ebuilds are best, then see Arch 
The solution to this, is to give a big kick up the arse to the slackers, but that's tricky to do when they're "virtual".
This is not a "distro war" for me. I want Gentoo to continue, to help Linux in general. It's just that I care about x86_64 and bugger-all else, and detest compilation problems thrown in my face which other distros (e.g. Arch) have patched already. |
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Kasumi_Ninja
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| Posted: Sat Nov 17, 2007 8:26 am Post subject: |
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| PaulBredbury wrote: | | desultory wrote: | | eclasses should not impede those starting to write ebuilds. |
Unfortunately, they do anyway. As proof, look at the number of Gentoo users, then look at the number of Gentoo users who submit patches to ebuilds. Look at the hundreds who moan about xmms without writing a single line of code.
If you're saying that "simple" ebuilds are best, then see Arch
The solution to this, is to give a big kick up the arse to the slackers, but that's tricky to do when they're "virtual".
This is not a "distro war" for me. I want Gentoo to continue, to help Linux in general. It's just that I care about x86_64 and bugger-all else, and detest compilation problems thrown in my face which other distros (e.g. Arch) have patched already. |
Am I reading between the lines that you are an Arch user? I totally agree about x86_64, imo Gentoo's x86_64 support lags behind any major distribution. Then again who needs x86_64 anyway 
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PaulBredbury
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| Posted: Sat Nov 17, 2007 10:48 am Post subject: |
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| Aniruddha wrote: | | you are an Arch user? |
Yes. Was I supposed to announce this somewhere
There is no such thing as the perfect distro. I'm currently trying Arch, after having it on my laptop for a year. I might come back to Gentoo, but it's more likely that I'll use Ubuntu as a "base" if I switch again.
Maintenance of Gentoo gets to feel like a full-time job, with the Gentoo devs trying their hardest to screw up our boxes.
Here's a list of my Gentoo gripes, if anyone is interested: dobin, unmerge python, built_with_use, rm -rf /, pink icons, udev breakage, pciutils deliberate sabotage, ALSA moron. |
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Kasumi_Ninja
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| Posted: Sat Nov 17, 2007 11:01 am Post subject: |
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| PaulBredbury wrote: | | Aniruddha wrote: | | you are an Arch user? |
Yes. Was I supposed to announce this somewhere
There is no such thing as the perfect distro. I'm currently trying Arch, after having it on my laptop for a year. I might come back to Gentoo, but it's more likely that I'll use Ubuntu as a "base" if I switch again.
Maintenance of Gentoo gets to feel like a full-time job, with the Gentoo devs trying their hardest to screw up our boxes.
Here's a list of my Gentoo gripes, if anyone is interested: dobin, unmerge python, built_with_use, rm -rf /, pink icons, udev breakage, pciutils deliberate sabotage, ALSA moron. |
 To bad to see you go! I always appreciated your ebuilds!
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voonte
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Joined: 04 Sep 2007
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| Posted: Sat Nov 17, 2007 1:33 pm Post subject: |
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| PaulBredbury wrote: | | Eclasses are good, but they also hugely increase the barrier to entry, for "normal people" to write ebuilds (not saying that I'm a normal person ). |
You're right. I found Arch's PKGBUILD files easier to grasp as a beginner, compared to Gentoo's ebuilds and eclasses. Eclasses might not be the best solution, but PKGBUILD files could need some DRY love.
| PaulBredbury wrote: | Exactly - your point was nonsensical. My point is that Arch makes it very easy to just recompile a package, if its default binary e.g. grabs unwanted dependencies.
Run "abs", copy the pkg from /var/abs/wherever to /var/abs/local/, edit it and recompile it. |
My point was, although Arch is a binary distro, I would like to see it support more source building features. An issue I had with the packages in /var/abs/local/ was that once some packages were updated, to keep your old changes you have to manually modify these packages. Of course, if you only have a couple of packages, it's no big deal, but I had several.
By the way, I'm currently running Arch on my media computer, but not on my desktop. |
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desultory
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Joined: 04 Nov 2005
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| Posted: Sat Nov 17, 2007 10:53 pm Post subject: |
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| PaulBredbury wrote: | | Unfortunately, they do anyway. As proof, look at the number of Gentoo users, then look at the number of Gentoo users who submit patches to ebuilds. Look at the hundreds who moan about xmms without writing a single line of code. |
You seem to be ignoring the first barrier to entry into any endeavor, willingness.
| PaulBredbury wrote: | | If you're saying that "simple" ebuilds are best, then see Arch |
Simple ebuilds are simple to write, whether they are better or worse depends on the complexity of the task they are to perform. |
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d2_racing
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Joined: 25 Apr 2005
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| Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2007 12:44 am Post subject: |
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| Aniruddha wrote: | | Right now, I'm checking for DesktopBSD,PCBSD and FreeBSD or OpenBSD. I will try to install my first BSD.For desktop usage try DesktopBSD, great community and a great product that stays close (in contrast to PCBSD) to FreeBSD. |
I currently downloading DesktopBSD, because I saw that a lot of people considere DesktopBSD like a FreeBSD.
In fact, they considere DesktopBSD like the graphical installer from Gentoo. So you have something to start your box and after that you have a FreeBSD box.
Do you have any feedback about DesktopBSD ? |
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Opera
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Joined: 06 May 2005
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| Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2007 1:00 am Post subject: |
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Unfortunately, desktop-bsd is based on not-up-to-date versions of FreeBSD. The FreeBSD sysinstall is not that hard I believe (well, not harder than Debian for example), or at least, PC-BSD. Since it is just FreeBSD OS with newbies utilities, you can use it like you use FreeBSD if you don't like pbi and all that stuff.
But most of users here are power users, so I recommend you instead to grab a snapshot of FreeBSD 7 and test all the new great things that come with, like the new scheduler or the wonderful ZFS. 
I use it as my everyday OS and it's pretty stable.
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d2_racing
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| Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2007 3:27 am Post subject: |
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Yeah, I will give it a shoot after I install DesktopBSD to see what kind of Os this thing is.
FreeBSD is one of the most popular BSD. |
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Opera
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| Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2007 2:00 pm Post subject: |
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I forgot to say : if you like the tools provided by DesktopBSD and fear to miss them, they are in FreeBSD's ports  http://www.freshports.org/sysutils/desktopbsd-tools/
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RazielFMX
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Joined: 23 Apr 2005
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Location: NY, USA
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| Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2007 4:17 pm Post subject: |
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| Opera wrote: | Unfortunately, desktop-bsd is based on not-up-to-date versions of FreeBSD. The FreeBSD sysinstall is not that hard I believe (well, not harder than Debian for example), or at least, PC-BSD. Since it is just FreeBSD OS with newbies utilities, you can use it like you use FreeBSD if you don't like pbi and all that stuff.
But most of users here are power users, so I recommend you instead to grab a snapshot of FreeBSD 7 and test all the new great things that come with, like the new scheduler or the wonderful ZFS.
I use it as my everyday OS and it's pretty stable. |
They ported OpenSolaris/Solaris 10's ZFS to FreeBSD? That's AWESOME! I wish they'd port ZFS to Linux. I've attended a few Sun Microsystems demonstrations on Solaris 10, and seen quite a few cool things ZFS can do.
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d2_racing
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| Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2007 5:08 pm Post subject: |
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Awesome |
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Kasumi_Ninja
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| Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2007 5:47 pm Post subject: |
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| d2_racing wrote: | | Aniruddha wrote: | | Right now, I'm checking for DesktopBSD,PCBSD and FreeBSD or OpenBSD. I will try to install my first BSD.For desktop usage try DesktopBSD, great community and a great product that stays close (in contrast to PCBSD) to FreeBSD. |
I currently downloading DesktopBSD, because I saw that a lot of people considere DesktopBSD like a FreeBSD.
In fact, they considere DesktopBSD like the graphical installer from Gentoo. So you have something to start your box and after that you have a FreeBSD box.
Do you have any feedback about DesktopBSD ? |
Another big plus for DBSD is that they are working on a GRUB bootloader (if I am not mistaken it should be ready by now). I find FreeBSD's bootloader horrible. I had troubles getting Linux to boot after FreeBSD had been installed, Oh and if you have an Nvidia card please test it's performance in FreeBSD. I found it's performance far worse then Linux..
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Opera
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Location: Paris
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| Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2007 6:12 pm Post subject: |
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| RazielFMX wrote: |
They ported OpenSolaris/Solaris 10's ZFS to FreeBSD? That's AWESOME! I wish they'd port ZFS to Linux. I've attended a few Sun Microsystems demonstrations on Solaris 10, and seen quite a few cool things ZFS can do. |
Yes, it's not totally finished yet, but it's already usable and reliable. And for the 8 version, we will have Dtrace, still from Solaris. 
About Linux, it's already available via FUSE, but it won't be a part of the Linux kernel itself because of licences issues (ZFS is under CDDL, which is incompatible with GPL).
| Aniruddha wrote: | | Another big plus for DBSD is that they are working on a GRUB bootloader (if I am not mistaken it should be ready by now). I find FreeBSD's bootloader horrible. I had troubles getting Linux to boot after FreeBSD had been installed, Oh and if you have an Nvidia card please test it's performance in FreeBSD. I found it's performance far worse then Linux.. |
The FreeBSD's bootloader is interesting because it's dynamic, so if you often plug in bootable devices, you don't have to deal with your bios, the bootloader manages them. But I prefer grub too, because it can boot nearly everything exists. And maybe also because I'm used to it...
About the nVidia cards, sorry, but I didn't see any performance differences between Linux and FreeBSD, the only thing that can be annoying for some users is the absence of drivers for the 64 bits version.
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Kasumi_Ninja
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| Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2007 12:18 pm Post subject: |
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| Opera wrote: | | About the nVidia cards, sorry, but I didn't see any performance differences between Linux and FreeBSD, the only thing that can be annoying for some users is the absence of drivers for the 64 bits version. |
That is good news I spend a few days in vain trying to improve graphical performance. I noticed because X felt very slow and unresponsive.
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Kasumi_Ninja
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| Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2007 1:08 pm Post subject: |
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Some hilarious quotes from Impressions of Fedora 8
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Things didn't go as smoothly as I expected; after completing the installation with a customised package selection (to include KDE, a web server and development packages), the system refused to boot with a "file system error". I repeated the exact same installation - with the exact same result (the fsck utility found no errors, though). On the third attempt, I reverted to the default package selection and this time the system booted fine. |
| Quote: | | For some reason, I always found myself getting the database from what seemed like the slowest mirror imaginable, located somewhere in Russia - it sometimes took several hours just to retrieve the package database! During this time it was, of course, impossible to use any other package management application, not even for search. |
| Quote: | | The only other bug I found was in gFTP, which is my preferred application for uploading files to the DistroWatch server due to its support for the SSH2 protocol. It's an upstream bug that gives a "permission denied" error on world-readable files when in SSH2 mode; however, this bug was fixed in Debian and Gentoo almost two years ago, so I was disappointed to see it still present in Fedora 8 (it is also unfixed in the current release of Mandriva). |
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d2_racing
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| Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2007 5:23 pm Post subject: |
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| Sabayon is buggy ? Are we surprise with that |
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Kasumi_Ninja
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| Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2007 5:27 pm Post subject: |
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| d2_racing wrote: | | Sabayon is buggy ? Are we surprise with that |
Lol, you have read the whole review.
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gundelgauk
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| Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2007 8:26 pm Post subject: |
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After reading a lot in this thread I feel a little bad about the amount of people who want to switch away from Gentoo or have already done so. A lot of the time it seems to be compile time and/or problems with the compilation process.
Well, I've been running Gentoo on my home "server", which is a crappy old Pentium 100 MMX with 184 MB RAM, for a bit over five years now. Back then I did a complete stage 1 installation and since then the system has been running 24/7 for 99.999% of the time. God knows how how many transitions it had to undergo: 2.4 -> 2.6, udev, gcc updates, and lots of others I don't remember any more. But I've always managed to keep the internet connection and services up for my people, even if I was having huge issues. And I've always been able to sort those issues out rather quickly, because of the community.
In the mean time I've been trying a few other distributions on my other computers out of curiosity. Tried OpenSuSE, RedHat, *buntu and two or three lesser known ones. None of them were really to my liking. The biggest issue is always that after installing and booting my system for the first time, I don't feel comfortable at all because I don't have a clear knowledge of how the system is configured, what packages are installed and so on. Well, it takes some time getting used to a new system. But once I manage to do that, I want to install a lot of software that I've been using. Gentoo has so much software in Portage, it's downright ridiculous (in a good way). And most of the time other distributions lack support for some programs I've grown to love.
Sadly that's also the reason why I'll probably never be a BSD user. I like the idea of OpenBSD very, very much but I also enjoy trying out lots of things and I guess Linux has greater diversity in general.
Well to make it short, I still like Gentoo a lot because I know and love its strengths and weaknesses. If I had to move though, it would probably be one of these:
a) Arch: Because I've read a lot about it in the past. And if it's true that it's a "binary Gentoo", I might like it.
b) Debian: Probably one of the best all round distributions.
c) OpenSuSE: No-brainer. You install it, it works, you use it. End of story. Really awesome for work where you don't have a lot of time for tweaking and maintaining your workstation. But I wouldn't want that for my computers at home. |
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Opera
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| Posted: Tue Nov 20, 2007 12:06 am Post subject: |
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If you like systems with huge repositories (as I do) you will be quite disappointed with Arch, there are very few packages officially supported, for everything else you have to rely on AUR. But a nice distro though, and pacman is impressively good and fast. I didn't try it for a long time, but let me positive impressions (except at the install stage where the grub's installation failed but easily fixed).
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d2_racing
Bodhisattva
Joined: 25 Apr 2005
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| Posted: Tue Nov 20, 2007 1:13 am Post subject: |
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| Aniruddha wrote: | | Lol, you have read the whole review. |
Yes my friend |
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d2_racing
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| Posted: Tue Nov 20, 2007 1:16 am Post subject: |
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| gundelgauk wrote: |
a) Arch: Because I've read a lot about it in the past. And if it's true that it's a "binary Gentoo", I might like it.
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Yeah I saw that too in the past |
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batistuta
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| Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 11:10 am Post subject: |
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| Aniruddha wrote: | | This isn't fair. ~x86 is exactly what it's name says: unstable, upgrading with Debian unstable or openSUSE factory is also bound to give you an headache. If you just use stable Gentoo (x86) you headache probably will be over |
Hey, I'm not blaming Gentoo. Actually I never blame any distro. My philosophy is that if a distro doesn't do what I want, this is not the distro's fault, but rather me using the wrong distro for my particular needs. And these needs might change over time.
Objectively speaking and with no rant meant: when I switched to ~x86 two years ago, I was updating my system with very rare breakage, and these were always fixed quickly. Now I'm having daily breakage, and some of it remains broken for days. My last one was with the new KDE upgrade, and I was issuing --skipfirst --resume like a maniac. It has become really painful and don't want to invest my free time on that. How does this translate to me? either
- I was lucky before
- This is a temporary glitch
- Devs decided to make ~arch more bleeding edge, at the risk of having more problems
- I'm screweing up things myself and no one else has problems
If I was lucky before, then this means that my luck is over and now I need to decide whether the "expected breakage" is what I want. And based on my needs, the answer is no. If this is a temporary glitch, I will see in a few months. I'll try Gentoo again in the future because I like this distro. If this is just my fault, then I don't know. But many people are having issues so I guess I'm not alone here.
Use x86? Give me a break. This is meant for servers or something like that which require a very very stable platform. Is this what Gentoo is meant to be? Then I might be using the wrong distro. In my opinion, for desktop usage, x86 is equivalent to running a 5 year old system. Before doing that I'd go for Ubuntu or Suse, which offer a much more recent package collection with few breakage.
So is it fair what I'm saying? Maybe not. But not 100% unfair either. I should choose the distro that suits me, but a distro should also follow what its users want. I would be willing to trade some bleeding edge for stability. In my opinion, BSD unstable is a good example of this balance. |
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Kasumi_Ninja
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| Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 11:40 am Post subject: |
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| batistuta wrote: | | Aniruddha wrote: | | This isn't fair. ~x86 is exactly what it's name says: unstable, upgrading with Debian unstable or openSUSE factory is also bound to give you an headache. If you just use stable Gentoo (x86) you headache probably will be over |
Hey, I'm not blaming Gentoo. Actually I never blame any distro. My philosophy is that if a distro doesn't do what I want, this is not the distro's fault, but rather me using the wrong distro for my particular needs. And these needs might change over time. |
I agree with your point of view, I personally don't care which distro people use. I only wanted to address some arguments.
| Quote: | | Use x86? Give me a break. This is meant for servers or something like that which require a very very stable platform. Is this what Gentoo is meant to be? Then I might be using the wrong distro. In my opinion, for desktop usage, x86 is equivalent to running a 5 year old system. Before doing that I'd go for Ubuntu or Suse, which offer a much more recent package collection with few breakage. |
Now that is not true. In Gentoo a package enters stable after one month have been passed without bugreport being filed. If you compare Gentoo with Ubuntu7.10/openSUSE10.3/Mandriva2008/Debian4.0/Slackware12.0/PCLinuxOS2007/Sabayon3.4/SimplyMepis7.0/Foresight1.4
you'll see that Gentoo has the same (or more up to date packages) for: kernel/glibc/kde etc. Only Fedora uses more recent packages.
| Quote: |
So is it fair what I'm saying? Maybe not. But not 100% unfair either. I should choose the distro that suits me, but a distro should also follow what its users want. I would be willing to trade some bleeding edge for stability. In my opinion, BSD unstable is a good example of this balance. |
If your read my above comment I think Gentoo stable suits you even better
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batistuta
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| Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 3:30 pm Post subject: |
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| Aniruddha wrote: | Now that is not true. In Gentoo a package enters stable after one month have been passed without bugreport being filed. If you compare Gentoo with Ubuntu7.10/openSUSE10.3/Mandriva2008/Debian4.0/Slackware12.0/PCLinuxOS2007/Sabayon3.4/SimplyMepis7.0/Foresight1.4
you'll see that Gentoo has the same (or more up to date packages) for: kernel/glibc/kde etc. Only Fedora uses more recent packages.
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Mmhh... I'll take your word for now since I haven't used x86 for more than two years. But my motivation to go to ~arch when I did was because of how outdated x86 was. KDE 3.5 had been out for more than 6 months, and stable was still using 3.4. Emule was a veeeery old version and more unstable than the "unstable" version. Gcc upgrades took eternities. I can't even count how many packages were simply not in x86 and in the end I had to make my package.keywords very large, with the known dependency issues. Maintaining my package.keywords didn't make sense anymore, it was way too big. And I'm not blaming Gentoo for this, it is not the goal of x86.
So I wanna underline that this is not a complain: lots of people want something stable, and x86 was very stable, but in my opinion it was very outdated. ~arch is up-to-date, but lately breaks constantly (at least on my system). So were does that leave users like me? Does unstable mean the apps, or the build process? We don't mind an "unstable" apps, in terms of programs being a bit buggy due to being bleeding edge, but we want a system that compiles. That is, that we can at least install these unstable programs.
And in my opinion, Gentoo has forgotten about us  |
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